If our lives end, and eventually everything we make disappears, does that mean none of it really matters? I think the opposite.

But sometimes it’s like lightning and then thunder. A sudden flash of re-cognition, then effects reverberating through their life. Tension grows within them, charge building and building, then explosive release - and the world is seen anew. Nothing seems the same: people, things, ideas take on strange, inviting aspects as they are integrated into a new scheme.

The lightning starts a fire. With this integration comes a rush, a euphoria even, a feeling that you understand things for the first time - and perhaps only you understand them. The presentation can seem unusually energetic, even manic: a particular cast to the face, a gleaming in the eyes, a fierce certainty in the voice. They wear religious symbols, they buy religious clothes, their whole identity revolves around the faith. This is why there’s no zealot like a convert: something happens to some people on conversion, as they are filled with restless fire, alluring and hazardous.

I’ve never been a convert - I was raised and am still nonreligious - but religious conversion, I’ve come to believe, is but one example of a broader psychological phenomenon: sometimes people, religious and nonreligious, undergo a profound reorganisation and reintegration of their view of life and of themselves. I’ve experienced this twice now in my life. The most recent concerns this Substack: a few months ago I had a sudden and sustained experience of philosophical inspiration, a coming together and falling into place of ideas I’d worried at for more than a decade. For some weeks everything was meaningful, everything was connected, I felt extraordinarily alive. The world opened before me and we sang together. It was a click, click, click of realisations, a kaleidoscope revolving and resolving into shapes I understood, recolouring my world. I needed to tell people what I had discovered! I began writing again, I redesigned my website, I thought more deeply about my philosophical project and how to convey it. I even bought new clothes.

The first was coming out of the closet. Many queer people will describe coming out in similar terms to the total self-and-world integration experienced by the zealous convert. You see yourself differently, a new social world beckons, values reorient and new possibilities arise. Again, a euphoria. Again, a desire to share the truth with everyone. Again, new clothes - though this time for different reasons.

The psychological pathway has these features, then: increasing tension between an existing framework of beliefs and experiences that don’t fit that frame, creates intense felt pressure; the pressure is released in a sudden, explosive reorientation that brings a sense of integration, authenticity, and mental unity; this results in feelings of euphoria, excitement (sometimes manic-seeming), a vibrating intensity and a desire to share what one has found.

Conversion can be quite a rush.

It can also carry quite a risk.

Chaplains don’t proselytise. It is forbidden. Sometimes students proselytise us, but never the other way round. While we work as chaplains, our role is to serve the existential growth of all who seek us out, whether they share our own perspective or not. It is not for us to judge or nudge: we help students understand themselves better, better shape their own commitments.

So, when a student comes to me with questions about their faith, my role is to help them explore those questions, not to push them towards my own beliefs. Sometimes, they do not even know what my beliefs are: students are incurious, sometimes, about who they have gone to speak to - they just want to speak to someone who will listen, and often that is me. So I’ve heard my share of conversion and deconversion narratives, felt the sense of loss and gain they can engender. Loss and gain in both directions, by the way: sometimes leaving a faith is every bit as existentially enlivening as joining one.

But I also listen out for warning signs, especially when conversion seems intense. Not because there is anything inherently wrong with an intense conversion, nor because I would seek to dissuade someone from a religious path merely because their destination differs from mine, but because conversion happens within social, cultural and psychological contexts, and those contexts are not always healthy.

What warning signs? The intensity seems a bit too much - trouble sleeping, racing thoughts, extreme devotion, excessive tithing. The certainty seems a bit too fierce. The desire to share with others becomes a need to forcefully convert them. There’s a strong undercurrent of shame - especially sexual shame. The conversion seems significantly influenced by fear of the consequences of not converting. The student’s social circle is epistemically limited and has gotten tighter. There is reliance on charismatic individuals for spiritual or intellectual guidance. Previous, deeply held moral convictions are discarded without good reasons. Outsiders to the new faith - outsiders like the very student themselves, not long before - are otherised and described collectively. A sense of self-importance, as when the student feels they have a special destiny or has received a personal revelation.

These are the things that make me wonder: are these flames too high, too hot?

Even still, the chaplain’s first calling is not correction, but accompaniment. We are not there to change the course of others’ thinking. But were a student to display all or many of the symptoms just described, I would want to accompany them closer. Ensure they are talking to someone outside their close religious network. Remind them, simply through my presence, that other ways of living are not just possible, but meaningful, respectable, even attractive. I’d want to be there more. Not because there is necessarily anything wrong, but because there might be, and it is better to be cautious than sorry.

For while it is uncommon, I have seen students convert rashly. I have seen them make dramatic decisions - life-altering decisions - on the basis of a fleeting rush of spiritual enthusiasm. I have seen them cut off friends, even family members, in preference for their faith. I have seen them woven too tightly into a religious community, such that they cannot see a way out. I have seen them manipulated, even abused.

The least a chaplain can do is look out for converts, and signpost services they may need if the restless fire begins to burn too bright.

It doesn’t help when others feed the flames.

Religions often have great systems of support - they are social networks, more than bundles of beliefs. And proselytising religions want converts: they think it’s part of their duty to convert the nonbelievers. So, for converts, they roll out the red carpet and set up a receiving line. For former critics of the faith, they throw a ball: “There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents…” Converts are received with rapture, celebrity converts more so, former public critics of the faith more so still - and one quickly gets the feeling that the celebration isn’t just on behalf of the convert, but the entire faith.

Former public critics are apologetic gold. They can quickly be recruited as “evidence” that the faith they’ve converted to is true. And if the convert’s smart, all the better! The advertisements write themselves: “If even he converted, and he’s so very smart, then who are you to resist!” The value is not just to nonbelievers, but believers too: those within the faith feel confirmed and strengthened when the convert is received. Wavering souls are secured, strong ones become stronger.

This recruitment, this feeding of flames, can happen with astonishing rapidity: the convert announces their conversion, and immediately others are using the conversion as evidence, as pressure. When personal revelation is forged into apologetic weapon, my Chaplain Chimes start to jingle.1 Are we celebrating and supporting the person still, or are we reducing them to ammunition in a spiritual battle?

Some converts, of course, willingly become weapons for their new faith, but even then it makes me pause, for when a convert becomes an apologetic resource, a person becomes an argument, and other parts of them are burned away. As they dance amid ecstatic fire, it can be hard to see beyond the flames. Part of a chaplain’s job is to remind the convert: it may feel this new identity is all you are, for a while - but it doesn’t have to be. Not if you don’t want that. You are more than your beliefs, and more than the role you play in others’ stories. This is a stage in your journey, not necessarily the destination. As you revel in the rush of your conversion, don’t forget there’s life beyond your revelation. Be warmed, not consumed.

This protects the convert from the fire - but what about the rest of us?

The fires of conversion are truly restless: they begin in the convert, but quickly spread as they’re wielded as a weapon by enthusiastic co-religionists, directed toward those outside the faith. If the convert is swiftly turned into apologetic ammunition, that ammunition is soon fired on nonbelievers, as receiving line becomes firing line.

The manoeuvre is familiar, we’ve seen some of it already: he’s so smart, he’s seen all the evidence and the arguments, what makes you think you’re right in your nonbelief when he’s come over? What’s so special about you? Thus, honest disbelief is cast as resistance, and the nonbeliever convicted as someone who denies the truth. Never mind that this is deeply disrespectful to the thoughtful nonbeliever - and outrageous to the follower of a different path. It’s a psychologically powerful trick which positions epistemic honesty as moral failure, and allows believers to attack from a different angle. Faced with the convert’s example, the nonbeliever isn’t just wrong, but wilfully so - and culpable for it.

Then they turn up the heat: we got this one, it’s only a matter of time before we get you too! A Christian friend posted a video recently noting a number of recent conversions - “They’ve All Changed”, was the headline - and the implication was clear: the tide is turning! I commented, playfully: “We haven’t all changed!”, and he replied “Yet!” It was a joke, and I took it in that spirit. But there’s a dynamic here, clear in Christian discourse in particular: the victory of the Church is inevitable. The convert is so easily co-opted into a story that says “The natural state of everyone is belief, so anyone who doesn’t believe is not a ‘no’ but a ‘not yet’.” When a convert is recruited into a campaign against others’ identities, a private affirmation becomes a tradition’s public proof, and both convert and apologetic targets are diminished.

So, time for some flame-retardant insulation: a conversion, even a high-profile one, even the conversion of a literal genius, is proof of what they believe, but negligible evidence for what we should believe. Religious conversion occurs for countless reasons, and many have little to do with the rational consideration of arguments. Upbringing plays a role. Culture plays a role. Peer pressure plays a role. Psychological factors play a role. Conversion is a messy, whole person process, not an argument we must rebut.

Almost every view, religious and nonreligious, has its brilliant converts. CS Lewis walks from atheism to Christianity and meets Bertrand Russell walking the other way. René Guénon, born Catholic, embraces Islamic esotericism while B.R. Ambedkar gives up Hinduism for Buddhism. Malcolm X is raised Christian, joins the Nation of Islam, then ends up closer to Guénon by becoming Sunni. With a cavalcade of converts marching in every direction, what weight should we place on the shoulders of one more? Not so much, be their fire ever so bright. Perhaps a great convert gives us cause to look more closely at their reasons for converting - but no convert confirms the truth of their faith.

We can recognise the flames burning within others, even feel their heat, without leaping into the fire ourselves.

How to receive the convert, then? Don’t feed the fire. Don’t wield it against others. Just tend it. Tend the flames with love, care, generosity of spirit - and some well-judged scepticism. We needn’t share the convert’s enthusiasm, actually. We needn’t celebrate heedlessly, even if they’re happy - if the conversion leads them to beliefs we believe untrue or harmful, we can express that view. And if they convert to “our side”? Still be sceptical. Don’t make them into a weapon, let them be a person. And be heedful of their capacity for further transformation: we don’t know where they might go next, and what today feels like a final destination might be just another step on their journey.

Long after the lightning sets the fire burning, after the thunder has died down, the flame still burns, and our job is to tend it. Not feed it. Not wield it. Just tend it.

Tend the restless fire, so it can sustain, and not consume, the soul.

Seeing no other way to proceed – and fearing you may be trapped inside this cylindrical tomb forever – you reach out your hand, extend a finger, and place it on the panel. It comes to life with an inviting computerized sound, responding to your touch, and the bulb on the left of the line begins pulsing. You put your finger there and the panel chirps again in affirmation. There is only one thing which can possibly follow: you complete the line, tracing from the bulb on the left to the curved edge on the right, and as you do the line fills up with light. As you complete the figure, the line begins to flash. Excited, you release your finger, receive from the panel a chime of sonic celebration, and the door swings open.

You are free.

This is the opening of The Witness, one of my favourite video games. You start trapped underground, forced to solve a simple puzzle – draw a line from left to right – to escape the tube in which you’ve been confined. This is the beginning of a journey round a deserted island, the only signs of former human habitation dilapidated buildings and petrified statues of people seemingly frozen in the middle of their lives. The island is divided into biomes, from forests and deserts to mountains and swamps, and exploring the island requires the player to solve many more panel-puzzles, most of them much more complex than the one which opens the game. All the puzzles share a single conceit, however: to solve a puzzle, you must draw a line between a circular bulb (the start) and a rounded terminus (the end) without at any point crossing over the line you are drawing. Armed with these basic rules you can explore, completing ever more complex puzzles to gain access to an ever-widening area of land - for every puzzle is a key, unlocking a new path or further puzzle.

Despite the simplicity of the basic concept, the puzzles are surprisingly varied and often incredibly difficult. Sometimes to get from start to finish you must navigate a maze of lines, choosing from multiple potential start and end points, finding the one route which will enable you to complete the maze without hitting a dead end. Sometimes, the puzzles interact with the surrounding environment, as when a series requires you to trace a line on the panel without crossing any of the shadows cast upon it by surrounding trees. As you explore you will discover panels which include strange symbols, and much of the challenge of the game is figuring out what the symbols mean, and how they change how you must solve a puzzle. One set of symbols dictates shapes you must create with the line you are drawing as you move from start to finish. On panels with colored squares, you must ensure the line you draw separates squares of one color from another. The range of symbols is wide, and together they make for a vast array of puzzles of fiendish and ingenious difficulty. Yet two things stay the same throughout The Witness: you must always draw a line from start to finish, and all the puzzles are on panels, like the one which beckoned back when you woke up in the dark subterranean tube.

Until you reach the mountaintop. [The next section includes spoilers for the endgame of The Witness]

As you make your way through The Witness, you can’t help but notice the mountain rising in the center of the world.  By far the highest point in the terrain, you can glimpse it through the branches of trees in the forest, see it towering above the sands of the desert. As you complete linked sets of puzzles, you unlock large machines which rise out of the environment, orient themselves, and then shoot a colored beam of light. These lights converge on the mountaintop. It is inevitable, given its prominence in the landscape and the guiding lights encouraging you as you solve more puzzles, that a curious player will eventually make their way up the mountain.

It’s not a difficult climb – the challenge in The Witness comes from the puzzles, not from moving about the world – but it is a pretty one. As you get higher up, passing caves and waterfalls, rising above the trees, the colorful diversity of the small island comes into view. The world of The Witness is presented in stylized fashion, with heightened colors and an almost cartoonish aesthetic, and the view from the mountain as you climb is gorgeous. One patch of forest is already showing the signs of autumn, a riot of reds and yellows and golds making it seem as if it has caught fire. The swamp is filled with improbably-hued algae, purple and blue on the water. A rooftop garden of vivid multicolored blooms stands out amidst the green forest canopy. And, surrounding it all, the sea gleams azure in the sunlight.

Atop the mountain, snow covers the ground. The very peak is flat, a small plateau, on which you find the highest concentration of petrified people anywhere on the island. One has been turned to stone while taking film footage of an event in the center of the plateau, frozen as they hold their camera in position atop a tripod. Two others are moving a yellow box into position. A fourth was constructing some strange machine, slamming a sledgehammer into a pillar, struck still at the moment of impact. Another couple of figures are arguing, one perilously close to the edge of the peak. It’s a strange, unsettling scene, with no hint yet of what these people were doing, why they were here on the mountain, or how they were turned to stone – The Witness presents a world full of mystery. The statues tell no tales.

Yet one of the objects on the plateau is more familiar: right at the edge, looking out over the island, steadied on a tripod, is another ochre panel like the one which greeted you when you first woke up here. You approach and recognize the now well-known shape of a puzzle, this one extremely simple: another bulb at the beginning, with a single line leading to a rounded terminus. But unlike the straight line which allowed you to escape the tube-tomb, this one is wiggly, and proceeds from bottom to top. In fact, you realize as you look out over the world that the line on the panel perfectly matches the shape of a river you can see below. There, down at the foot of the mountain, a waterfall cascades into a circular pool, before meandering to, yes, a curved terminus. The shape and line of the river is recreated perfectly in the shape and line on the puzzle panel. Quickly, you complete the puzzle on the panel: just like the others, you hear a satisfying chime to indicate that you have done so correctly (no surprise - it is just a single line, start to finish).

Nothing happens. No door opens in the world. At least not literally. Instead, something opens in your mind. You reach out and, trembling a little now with anticipation, place your finger not on the panel but the pool. Something shifts. Lights start rising from the pool, hundreds of luminous fireflies floating up from it as, with mounting excitement, you trace the pathway of the river to its natural end. You release your finger, and are rewarded with a cascade of light, a fountain of fireworks. You have completed a puzzle in the world.

This moment completely changes The Witness. Now, instead of just looking for puzzles on panels, you are looking for them everywhere. Wherever you see a circular shape, or something which looks suspiciously like the rounded off line which ends every puzzle, you begin to look around for how to use the landscape to make a line puzzle out of it. During this new pursuit a perceptive player will find hidden puzzles on the side of buildings, in abandoned railway tracks, in shadows on the ground, in patches of blue water, and even, once, in the clouds above. All these puzzles might have been missed had the panel on the mountaintop not drawn the player’s attention to the similarity between the shape of the pool and river below and the riddles they have been diligently solving. But once that simple connection is made, the whole world is transformed. Areas which previously would not have drawn the eye are revealed as potential hiding places for new puzzles. Everything is exciting. The landscape comes alive, and every vista brims with wonder.

There is more to see.

Science and Our World of Wonders

Our world is wondrous, like the world of The Witness. That panel on the mountaintop was, like the others, a key - it didn’t just unlock a new puzzle, but a new way of seeing the game-world. Features that were always present become newly salient, and the world becomes richer as a result. This is how all the best learning works: it doesn’t just give us new facts, but unlocks new ways of seeing. In real life, this process is rarely as simple as the player’s mountaintop realisation. We have to work a little harder to unlock the wonder of our world. But the keys to wonder are there, if we know how to find them.

Once we understand the theory of evolution, we never look at the natural world the same way again. In the leopard’s dappled spots, the flytrap’s vibrant mouth, and the chestnut’s prickly spines we see steps in the ancient dance of predator and prey - vastly different things connected by a single fecund principle. We can look at our beloved pets and recognize that we are related, expressions of one tree of life, connected not only through the experiences we have shared together, but through our very genes!

Learning a little geology, we see in every mountain range an ancient clash of crusts, rock forced up over aeons - the realisation that the contest is ongoing is vertiginous. Road and railway cuttings are no longer simply a convenient route through which we pass, but an opportunity to view uncovered strata, records of past epochs pressed into the very earth.

Atomic theory shows us we are a part of the cosmos, that the same tiny fragments which make us up are the building blocks of every piece of matter in the universe. Everything, from a neutron star to a neuron in our brain is made of the same matter, everything that is a thing shaped from the same stuff. This is not immediately obvious. It didn’t have to be so. But it is so, and to look at all of everything and know “I am made of this!” unlocks an appreciation of our interconnectedness with all that is.

Science gives us more to see.

Opening Doors with the Arts

The arts can do the same. I once attended an exhibit of artifacts from the life of JRR Tolkien, the author of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It was a stunning collection: his sketchbooks, early story drafts, and maps of the fantastical world he created lined walls and filled cabinets. More fascinating still were reams of letters written to Tolkien from his many fans. Frequently these letters demonstrated the ways in which Tolkien’s stories – stories of elves, dwarves, orcs, and hobbits, set in an unreal world in many ways unlike our own – had enriched the experience of his readers.

Fans sent Tolkien photos of tree trunks they thought looked like Ents, the giant talking tree-creatures of Middle Earth. They sent him drawings of “hidden stairways” they had seen while out roaming, their imaginations sparked by his narratives. They sent him stories they had written, Tolkien’s characters mingling with creations of their own, with some of their friends thrown in for good measure. For these readers – and for the millions who share their experience - Tolkien’s fictional world unlocked a new perception of our real one.

The arts often do this. Theatre and literature can enhance our understanding of ourselves and other people, as we use the models provided by fiction to organize experience. Once we know the story of Dr. Faustus, the archetype of overreaching ambition, we see Faustian bargains everywhere - including, perhaps, in our own lives. Learning just a little about architecture can add texture and richness to our commute to work, as we begin to appreciate the styles and periods of the buildings we pass by, picking up small details we otherwise would have missed. Just a few cooking classes can begin to unlock the world of food, making every meal more complex and pleasurable as we identify different flavours and textures on our tongue. Become a connoisseur of dance or fashion and we can be forever fascinated by how people move and dress.

Learning about the arts even makes the arts themselves more wondrous. Understanding music theory helps us recognize aspects of music we never knew to listen for, and even songs we’ve heard a thousand times seem new. Once we know about keys and time signatures, tempo and rhythm, melody and tonality, music becomes a more profound pleasure - we hear more, and more deeply. A course in cinematography enriches our appreciation of movies, alerting us to the countless decisions which go into each and every frame of film. Reading a book on style unlocks the world of words as we begin to ask of every sentence “Why that word, and why there?”

The arts give us more to see.

Want Wonder? Learn More

So, a simple revelation: if you want a more wonderful life, you should learn more about the world. Learning – in the sciences, the arts, the humanities, the vocations, whatever! – helps deepen, complexify, and enrich experience, making every day an opportunity for wonder. Through learning we can become a witness to the world, seeing more than we saw before, and appreciating life more fully.

The Witness did this for me. Once, at the end of a long flight home, much of it spent playing the game, I looked out the window as we descended toward the earth. Laid out beneath me was the city of St. Louis, its parks and pools and baseball fields. And there, in the suburbs, a residential street with a cul-de-sac on one end, and a roundabout on the other. Immediately an image leapt to mind: this was a hidden puzzle! There, at the bulb of the roundabout, was the start, and the rounded cul-de-sac the end!

I reached out my hand, pressed a finger to the plane’s window, and smiling, traced a line. I heard the chime of wonder.

There is always more to see.

Oh, well.

Before him sit students in rows of three. Modern white chairs, no tables in front. Some hold notebooks awkwardly in their laps as they stare at the Teacher and the whiteboard to his left. That, of course, is also white: white legs and a white frame, only little black wheels punctuating the vast expanse of white behind.

Almost nothing casts a shadow. It’s hard to tell where floor meets wall. Is there, in fact, a wall, or does the room go on forever, an endless void of white?

iPurgatory.

The Teacher speaks:

“So, welcome! This is a course entitled The Primacy of Beauty.”

This is the first hour of 9.
Nine hours.
IX
IIII IIII
… … …
Dah dah dah dah dit

Today, we are confronting “The Fall of Beauty.”

As the Teacher speaks, images appear in the void behind. They are animated, unfurling slickly, accompanied by a sound. The sound is “WWWWWWWWWWWWHHHHHH…”, but more rumbly, like a lorry driving past your bedroom window at night. The images are AI generated. Can the students see them? Who knows.

“Beauty used to be considered sacred. It used to be considered an occurrence of truth.”

The Teacher builds his argument. Terms are introduced, ideas expressed. Beauty as a name of God. Sacred beauty. The “hermeneutics of suspicion”. The “illusion of reality”. The animated AI images condense and evaporate against the stark white backdrop like animated AI images condensing and evaporating against a stark white backdrop. Some students scribble uncomfortably on their thighs, trying to keep up, but most are stiff and all are utterly silent. Are they AI like the images? Who knows.

A jarring cut, and the white box is gone. A sudden riot of colour, then the nasal tones of Bill Maher wake me up:

“Are you starting your own college?”

Jordan Peterson, sitting in front of an American Flag:

“Yeah, well, it’s well-started!”

Then a montage. A full-on Rocky-style montage! YES! It has dramatic strings bowing arpeggios up and down. It has a finger scrolling smoothly through an app on a phone. It has Business Leadership Ethics by Prof. Stephen R.C. Hicks. It has $399 a year (“something approximating zero cost”). It has Jordan Peterson with a dinner jacket showing 100 icons of saints (is this Sacred Beauty?). It has a “Tende Supra” logo - aim higher! It has preppy youngsters drinking coffee from branded mugs while watching lectures on their phone. It has a sizzle reel of white men teaching in the big white box. It has

PETERSON ACADEMY - Join now!

And then we’re back in purgatory.

“Notice, we’re already starting to get a little bit about what the moment of truth would be. That moment of realisation…We have that phrase, ‘The moment of truth.’ - ‘Oh, now I know what all this means and what’s really going on!’…That is the ancient notion of beauty…Beauty is when we have a perceptual experience through which we realise how something is real, we realise a deeper reality.

A niggle, a mental nick, a slight interruption of my brain mars the smooth surface of the lecture: “Ummm, ackchewally, that’s not what 'moment of truth’ means…” But the Teacher glides serenely on.

“What have we replaced this ancient notion of beauty with?”…the Aesthetics of the Smoooooooooooooooooooooooooooth.”

A smooth-looking graphic slides smoothly in.

Look at this lectern. It’s so smooth. Look at the floor. It’s so smooth. Everything is smooth. Your cellphones are smooth. Your watch surfaces are smooth. Everything is smooth and clean. You look around and it’s all this smooth.

This is philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s idea. What is wrong with smooth? The Teacher explains:

“The smooth is not challenging…It’s readily available. It’s easily consumable by me. It’s easily usable. It’s in no way shocking. It doesn’t require any insight…There’s no obstacle to our consumption or use…[This is] a model of reality as indeterminate, empty, shallow. Like a screen that we project on.”

Or like a big, bald, bare white box, filled with white chairs on a white floor before white walls which we project on.

“If we can project onto it, that means it has no depth…Smooth. Empty. Shallow.”

The performative contradiction would, were it ironic, be masterful.

I’ve been watching half an hour now, and wonder what I’ve learned. I’ve been told some definitions of beauty by various thinkers. I’ve been told there is some threat to beauty in the modern world - but I’m not sure what it’s supposed to be. I’ve been introduced to the ideas of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” and the “aesthetics of the smooth” - but so far these are just labels rattling around in my head. I’ve been told a lot, but I have not learned a lot. I have been presented with no clear arguments I can reconstruct, no real problems that have provoked deep thought, no examples that stretch beyond the bounds of the box. There’s nothing for the ideas to attach to.

Perhaps the room is too smooth.

A new image appears: the face of Paulo Freire, scowling. Freire described the “banking model” of education: teachers deposit knowledge into empty students, who wait like receptacles to be filled. I think of the silent students in their sleek white chairs, unable to speak or ask questions, no space even for a notebook. They are positioned as props, stage scenery to make a monologue look like a classroom, conjuring an illusion of learning. I think of the smooth-scrolling screen of the Peterson Academy app, countless hours of Lectures from the White Box, deposits for silent students all over the world.

Freire was never there. The lecture continues, and the Teacher invokes Picasso’s Guernica. I start to get excited - perhaps we will encounter an actual artwork! But no: the name of the work appears, but the artwork itself does not. The Teacher tries to describe it - “That famous picture with the sort of horse and the lightbulb above” - but despite the wizardry that can conjure any image, the actual factual painting is not welcome in the Box. Or perhaps it refuses the summons, unwilling to perform on such a sterile stage. No matter: in the Big White Box, what’s important is not beauty, not art, but what the Teacher is saying about them.

It ends without ending. The Teacher is talking about the unimaginably vast range of logical and physical possibilities there are. I don’t know why - I lost the slippery thread an age ago. But there are lots of possibilities. So many!

“Are you getting a sense about this? This is a problem. It’s a problem…”

He walks back to his lectern as if to expound further, but the image fades out as music fades in. We have not finished a thought. We have not accomplished an argument. We’ve just run out of time, the sand all piled in the bottom of the hourglass. Time to turn it over.

I want to smash the hourglass. I want to liberate the sand and run my hands through it, feel its grainy texture and its grit. Even the glass, the sharp and ragged glass, would be preferable to all this smoothness. I don’t much like Byung-Chul Han’s aesthetics: it is itself too smooth, it moves too swiftly from cherry-picked examples to over-broad claims. But when it comes to Jordan Peterson’s Big White Box, he nails it:

In digital beauty the negativity of the other is entirely removed. It is therefore perfectly smooth. It is not meant to contain any tear. Its signature is pleasure without any negativity, namely the Like. Digital beauty forms a smooth space of the same, which does not permit anything alien, any alterity, to enter.1

In Jordan Peterson’s Big White Box, ideas slip by with no resistance. Thinkers have no texture and no grain. Arguments gain no purchase, concepts no leverage. We become silent students, letting words wash over us, lulled to sleep by educational ASMR.

Suddenly I think of Christmas. A Christmas 30 years ago when, as a teenager, I went with a friend to the Royal Institution. Each year since 1825 they’ve hosted Christmas lectures to educate the public. I remember an amphitheatre with warm-wood floors and seats of magenta in a U: they surround the stage, and they are filled with children. I remember the electric buzz of excitement. I remember wild, messy experiments, kids pulled from their chairs to take part. I remember laughter, colour, fun, chaos, and life.

In the Big White Box, students are arranged facing the teacher for the benefit of the camera. Here, the seats are arranged to almost envelop the speaker, drawing the audience closer to the demonstrations - and to each other. In the Big White Box, the aesthetic is sterile and intangible. Here, it’s filled with things to touch and smell and feel. In the Big White Box, the outside world is banished, and the lecture hall is made to illustrate the words the Teacher speaks. Here the world is brought inside, examples and experiments risked in real-time, as, before our very eyes, the world speaks for itself.

This is how learning comes alive: through friction, provocation, and participation. We can learn from lectures - a good lecture is a thing of beauty. But the mind requires resistance and a chance to answer back. A teacher’s role is not to give smooth answers but to pose prickly questions, and the goal is sustained encounter not with the Teacher but with the world.

When students are silenced, when no space is made for questions, when presentation is hyper-slick, when an artwork’s title is present but the artwork itself is not, when ideas are presented as things to be viewed instead of claims to be tested, then we have not a replacement for the university, but education as content, learning as merch.

We pay our subscription fee, listen while we do the dishes, leave a like or a comment, and smooth on.

A Multicoloured Concrete Drum

Most of my job is unlocking the piano.

As Lead Chaplain for the University of Sussex, I work from an office below the chapel. Our chapel is housed in an extraordinary 1960s building, a stone cylinder with a shallow copper cone for a roof. The chapel is upstairs, a circular space with walls of concrete and coloured glass. Massive concrete blocks alternate with rich, thick, colourful panes, to create a kaleidoscopic tapestry, a warm cocoon of light.

It is not unlike your foyer, in fact – my chapel and your building were built within two years of each other, speaking similar architectural languages.

So, imagine the rainbow glass of your foyer covering the walls of a circular stone room the size of the auditorium you’re in right now. You would be surrounded by colour, inside a resonant concrete drum. That is my chapel, and my office is below it.

The chapel has two pianos in it. One is old and tired and creaky. The other is also old — but it is a Steinway, so we keep it locked. Students come every day to play the piano, and they always want to play the Steinway.

So I unlock it for them.

Some students play pop music. Others play Bach. Some like musical theatre. But one student plays…waterfalls. Waterfalls, and thunder, the rush of wind before it dies. Almost every day this student comes to play. He brings no sheet music with him. Instead, he improvises extraordinary, trance-like explorations of sonic territory. Rich, rumbling, textured things.

What’s amazing is the thickness of the sound. As he plays, the sound densens and deepens. It feels like I could run my hands through it. Sometimes there are strains of melody, flickers of tune that rise up from pattern to awareness, arpeggios up and down. But mostly it is quickly repeated chords layered and layered and layered, the pedal down to sustain them, some given more attack before they fall again into the mixture.

I sit in the choir stalls listening to him play. The music seems like it goes on forever, it never stops, a continuous field of sound, sometimes gathering and gaining force, shaking the whole multicoloured room, resounding round the concrete drum, then subsiding like a wave after it has crashed. Sometimes insistent, sometimes pleading, sometimes urgent, sometimes angsty, then relaxed, resigned, momentarily satisfied.

My student’s head is bowed right down to the keyboard, his glasses slightly catching the light, gleaming against the piano’s dark wood. Suddenly he hammers furiously. I can hear the hammers pounding, the strings rebounding off them, and now a melody gathers as he keeps exploring. My skull buzzes with sound.

It is so very beautiful.

Searching for Beauty

I wonder what my student’s searching for, in all that music. Why does he come back, day after day to play? Beneath the chords, between the notes, inside that cavernous sound, what is he hoping to find?

Perhaps the secret’s in that word: “beauty”. That’s the word I reach for when I try to describe his music. Some students’ piano playing is technically impressive. Much of it is fun and lively. Some is, honestly, enthusiastic, but not so good.

His is beautiful. It fills you up. Just thinking of it, my breathing changes, my fingers tingle. There’s something special here.

Philosophers and theologians have long had the intuition that there is something special about beauty – and many claim that beauty is one of the signals of the divine. Beauty, they argue, is not merely a pleasing arrangement of this-worldly stuff, but a portal to another, infinite world. One of the purest expressions of this idea comes from CS Lewis, the novelist who wrote the Narnia books: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe etc. Have you read those books, or seen those films? Lewis was also a devout Christian and one of the most influential Christian theologians of the 20^th Century. He wrote a lot about beauty – what it is and what it means. In one of his books, The Weight of Glory, he wrote:

“We do not want merely to see beauty… We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”1

Lewis goes further. He argues that we don’t just want the perceptual experience of beauty itself. We are not satisfied by the music on its own. Rather, our appetite for music – and other expressions of beauty – points to something else. In a famous passage, he writes:

“These [beautiful] things…are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”2

Lewis argues that beauty, and the strange longing that arises in us in response to it, is evidence that there is something out there that could satisfy that longing. The music doesn’t satisfy it, so what does? What is beauty pointing us towards?

Perhaps predictably, given Lewis’ Christian beliefs, he thought beauty was calling us to heaven, and to God. Beauty is the awakening in we finite creatures of a desire for an infinite homeland. Our hunger for beauty is never sated because what we want, we cannot get in this life – only in the next. But the fact we hunger for beauty at all is evidence that there is a next life. Because, Lewis argues, just as we would not develop a hunger for food were food not something real, and just though we would not develop a yearning for romantic companionship were we not the sort of species we are, our insatiable desire for beauty, too, is rooted in something real: the existence of a world beyond this one.

“At present”, Lewis writes, “we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door…[But] Some day, God willing, we shall get in.”3

This-worldly beauty, in Lewis’ telling, is something like a sign, a hint, a whisper of another place: in one of his novels a character calls it “The place where all the beauty came from”. We are arrested by beauty because it calls us from elsewhere to elsewhere.

I am an atheist and a Humanist. In fact, I am a professional Humanist, one of very few! I do not believe in God or in heaven. But when I think about my student in the chapel, it’s not so easy to dismiss Lewis’ interpretation.

It is too simple, for instance, to say “My student plays the piano because enjoys it.” Of course he does. But he doesn’t just enjoy it: he needs it. He comes back day after day, he cannot get enough. I see in his behaviour and attitude the “longing” Lewis talks about.

Other aspects of Lewis’ description ring true, too. As I watch my student, he leans into the keyboard, head bowed, eyes closed, aching to get close to it.

It looks like love.

Sometimes, as he sways and bobs and surges and flows, he seems to merge with the music entirely.

It looks like devotion.

There is something more than simple pleasure here. Lewis says we want “to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.” That is right. My student seems to wish to be united with the piano, to pass into the music, to receive it into himself, to bathe in it. That is, indeed, how it feels to sit inside that concrete multicolour chapel-drum surrounded by the music that he makes: it is a sonic bath, and I always want more.

And, yes, it seems to pull me out of myself. People call this “transcendence”, the expansion of experience so much we seem to break the bounds of ego and float free.

Yes, I said “transcendence”. I know many Humanists dislike the term – I’m just telling you how it feels to sit in that chapel with my student and his music. The word feels about right somehow, when I’m sitting there in my sonic bath.

But is it right? Is Lewis right that beauty calls from a transcendent mountaintop, the place where all beauty came from?

Inscendence Instead

Don’t worry, I’m not converting to Christianity in real time. Instead, I offer a different explanation: I think beauty comes from this mundane world, from matter arranged in resonant relationship. Beauty may call us out of ourselves, yes, but it doesn’t call us beyond this world. Rather, it discloses possibilities within this world that are normally dormant. Beauty doesn’t pull back a veil to reveal a world beyond reality; rather, beauty is like a singing glass. Under most conditions, a wineglass will not sing. But if you strike it right, and carefully, it will make a gorgeous noise – and remind us that this world harbours possibilities we usually ignore.

Let us return to the beginning.

Most of my job is unlocking the piano.

The chapel has two pianos in it. One is old and tired and creaky. The other is also old — but it is a Steinway. Students come every day to play the piano, and they always want to play the Steinway.

Why do they want to play the Steinway?

All pianos are machines. We call them “instruments”, and that word is instructive. There are many kinds of instruments: medical instruments, scientific instruments, musical instruments. An “instrument” is a tool that serves a purpose – it is a thing for doing. Medical instruments help us do medicine better. Scientific instruments help us do science better. Musical instruments help us do music better. Do beauty better.

Students want to play the Steinway because that material machine is a better instrument, a better tool. When they play that one, the spell the music casts is more powerful. Not because the Steinway has a special essence, not because it is infused with something of the divine, but because of the tautness of its strings, the precision of its hammers, the shape of its soundboard. Its arrangement of physical parts makes more resonant sounds, creating richer music.

When I attend, too, to the experience of listening, its materiality emerges. I can feel the music press against me, feel it vibrating the bench beneath me, feel it rattling my chest and my shaking my teeth. The music is a meaty, matterly thing.

Even the term “transcendence”, when I attend more closely, feels subtly wrong. That word has many meanings, but it often means going beyond the physical, entering a spiritual or divine reality. Certainly, it seems this is what CS Lewis is describing when he talks about getting to the right side of that door, getting in to reality. Transcendence is us being called beyond the threshold.

But that’s not quite how it feels when I’m absorbed in my student’s music – not really. I feel an expansion of myself, yes. A connection with the world, yes. Like I’m going somewhere, yes – that too. But not like I am going somewhere else. I don’t feel summoned beyond that multicoloured chapel. Instead, I feel more habituated within it.

My father’s family is Welsh, and there is an old Welsh word – “cynefin” (pronounced kuh-nev-in). It means habitat, familiarity, a sense of belonging. But not abstract belonging: cynefin is the place where you have roots, like a path well-trodden through a field, a place marked by the tracks you’ve made through it, and the impressions you’ve left.

That’s how it feels to listen to my student’s music: the music does not make the room disappear, it makes the room more present. I notice the vibrations in the bench beneath me. How the concrete walls resound the soundwaves back. I see the coloured glass, how light thickens as it passes through the windows. Even my own body responds: my chest, my teeth, my skull all singing. I feel like a string dancing in sympathetic vibration with the music that he plays. We are connected, not transported.

That is why “transcendence” feels wrong. I am not moving “out” or “above” this world – transcendence; I am connecting more deeply to it – inscendence.4 For a few minutes, as my student plays, he, and the piano, and the room, and I are part of the same song. As the world around me starts to hum – and I along with it – I feel more at home.

Perhaps we need a different philosopher. Iris Murdoch called beauty “an occasion for unselfing.” Her idea was, that when we encounter beauty, something in the world captures our attention, expands our horizons of perception, and leaves us with a broadened outlook. She wrote:

“I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important.”5

That captures it, I think. That captures the extraordinary absorption beauty can sometimes provoke: “There is nothing now but kestrel.” Sometimes it feels as if there’s nothing but my student’s music. There, too, is expanded awareness: beauty can change our sense of what matters. I often leave the chapel feeling lighter. But notice: in this description of Murdoch’s, there is no “elsewhere”, no “other country”, no “real reality” behind a closed door. The kestrel is as much part of this world as Murdoch is. And so too with me, my student, the Steinway, and the chapel: the movement provoked by beauty is not upward beyond this world, but outward within it.

So now we have a new idea of beauty. We are not “on the outside of the world” – we’re in the only world there is. But sometimes, when we arrange this world just right, it sings to us. My student’s experience playing the piano, my experience listening to his music: neither summon us beyond this world. Instead, they disclose what this world is capable of – and what we are capable of – when we align things well. Beauty is not an escape, but a revelation.

Some people tell me beauty is a bolt from beyond: transcendent light piercing the veil between our world and the next. When we lose ourselves in beauty, they say, we briefly escape this world, flying up and out.

I say beauty is matter in resonant relation. Relation to itself, and to us. When we find ourselves in beauty, we deeply inhabit this, our homeworld, connecting among and through.

Lewis calls you to heaven. I am calling you home.

Not transcendence.

Inscendence.

A priest stands at the altar of an old stone church. We are nearing the heart of the mass, and the congregation sings lustily as gifts of bread and wine are brought forward. Soon, the priest will prepare the offerings and invite the congregation into prayer.

Suddenly, the priest begins to rise. A look of rapture on his face, his hands open to the heavens, he ascends - first a few inches, then a few feet, until his knees are level with the altar. The hymn dies as the congregation falters, stunned. Murmurs of confusion mingle with clamours of fright and cries of exultation. First a couple, then all at once, they fall to their knees.

All except one woman. She, instead of bowing her head, cocks it quizzically. Her eyes narrow as she peers closely at the flying priest. Then, with preternatural calm, she steps out from her pew and walks slowly down the nave toward the altar, ignoring the confused and affronted looks from the crowd.

She reaches the front of the church. The priest is now even higher, his feet hanging limp beneath his cassock, his face radiant with joy. The woman circles him, peering closely. Passes her hands beneath him. Then, with a shrug, she reaches out her hands, grabs both his ankles, and pulls.

Interrogating Miracles

The blind saw. The lame walked. The sick healed. The storm quelled. The sea split. The bread bred. The fiend fled. The sun fell. The man flew. The corpse lived.

Miracles.

Witnessing a miracle in one of the most profound experiences a person can undergo. Those who claim to have seen them are often changed forever, their worldview upended by the astonishing things they’ve witnessed. Miracles provoke deep self-reflection, religious conversion, and are even the lynchpin of entire religions: in Corinthians it is written, “if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.” The miracle secures the faith.

Yet most of us will never witness a miracle. C. S. Lewis defined a miracle as “an interference with nature by supernatural power.”1 Miracles, then, are by definition rare: they involve the interruption of natural laws, and so to perceive them as miracles these laws must most always be stable. A “regular miracle” would just be an unexplained natural regularity. Their rarity is also a significant component of their force: the astonishment miracles provoke is in large part because they are not supposed to happen. So, miracles happen rarely, and are dramatic when they occur.

This means the vast majority of information we have about miracles is testimony from those who claim to have seen them - and much of that from long ago. Nonbelievers are most often exhorted to believe in a miracle on the basis of others’ reports - as well as, occasionally, some scattered physical evidence - photographs (usually of poor quality), and increasingly today video (again, usually of poor quality).

Hence, a critical question:

What sort of evidence should we require before we come to believe a miracle has occurred?

Provoked by a Challenge

This question was provoked by a challenge. I was recently asked to consider the evidence in favour of a specific miracle:

Challenge accepted, Qoheleth! (I wish I had such a cool name.)

I read the article - it argues, essentially, that in the case of St. Joseph of Cupertino and his supposed levitation, there is sufficient evidence to defeat every naturalist objection, as well as the worry that demons might have caused St. Joseph to fly, and that the only reasonable interpretation is that he levitated multiple times through the power of God. Here’s how the article dismisses naturalistic explanations for the evidence we have:

These reasons, taken in conjunction with the failure of the skeptical explanations provided…should lead every rational person to reject the naturalistic account. We simply have too much evidence to the fact that Joseph levitated in the presence of a great number of witnesses, many of whom were reliable intellectuals that would not be easily fooled by whatever trick could be proposed for Joseph’s levitation.

And here’s how it ends:

Based on a careful reconstruction of his biography and a thorough examination of competing claims, this article establishes that St. Joseph of Cupertino levitated and flew through the power of God. These miracles are so well attested that they provide powerful testimony to the existence of God and the power of the true Church.

This is an extraordinarily strong position. Qoheleth is literally saying that to believe there is a naturalistic explanation for the supposed flights of St. Joseph of Cupertino is demonstrably irrational - that “every rational person” will, on the force of the evidence presented, share their opinion. This is to imply that this case literally defeats naturalism as a live philosophical option.

I, on the other hand, read the article and find absolutely nothing in it to trouble my (broad) naturalism. I did not feel the need to investigate the accounts more deeply, I did not feel spiritually or theologically troubled, I did not feel my worldview shaking and cracking beneath me. My felt response was “Meh.”

I report this not as evidence that my view is correct: of course my felt response is not such evidence. Instead, I want to point out that there is a massive difference between our responses to the same evidence. That’s interesting in itself and worth exploring: why, when Qoheleth sees this evidence, do they think “Naturalism is demonstrated to be rationally untenable!” while I, a naturalist, think “Meh.”?

This experience is common when I encounter miracle proponents defending supernatural accounts of reported phenomena from the past. When I read Ethan Muse’s argument that the Fatima events were miracles, or listened to him defend various miracle claims on Pints with Aquinas (I watched 5 hours of this!), I end up more puzzled than convinced. When I read Peter Bartholomew say “the evidential force of the miracle [of the Sun] is immediately clear to anyone who listens with an open mind”, and “You do not need to spend months studying to realize that [it]…is powerful evidence for Catholicism”, my eyebrows threaten to raise up off my head. Miracle proponents often act as if the evidence and reasons they present are conclusive, yet I find myself unmoved.

How can this be?

Some will say I am being irrational and stubborn: I am unmoved because I wish to be. I am comfortable in my naturalist bubble and I don’t want to allow it to be punctured. So, I reject what is obviously demonstrable, and throw good evidence for miracles out the window. This is of course possible, and I want to be aware of my own biases and preferences when evaluating evidence.

But I think there’s another reason: I am unmoved while miracle proponents are convinced because we have different epistemic expectations. We disagree about what sort of evidence would be required to secure a miracle claim and, more broadly, what sort of epistemic posture is appropriate to investigate them.

The purpose of this article is to tease apart two different epistemic approaches to the question of miracles. I am not attempting here to evaluate any specific miracle claim, but to characterise two broad approaches to them. In so doing, I will discuss various claims and the sorts of evidence offered, but my point is about our epistemic practice in general.

Investigation vs. Witnessing

When I say I think miracle proponents and I have differing epistemic expectations, I don’t just mean that we have different priors about whether miracles are possible, given different beliefs about the likelihood of God’s existence etc. (although I expect that is also true). I mean that we have fundamentally different expectations regarding what a convincing miracle account should look like, what sort of evidence would be sufficient in order to convince us that a miracle really happened, and what epistemic processes should be employed legitimate a miracle claim.

This difference in epistemic expectations is qualitative: it is not just about the amount of evidence we have, but the type. Not just about evidence at all, actually, but also about our epistemic posture and approach. To describe the difference succinctly, I want an experimental, forensic, broadly scientific approach to miracles; miracle proponents seem to be satisfied with a testimonial, observational, historical, one.

I want investigation; they’re content to witness.

Let’s draw out the difference. For me, when I introspect regarding my epistemic expectations when it comes to a miracle claim, I find I want to see something like this:

• An effect is observed multiple times under strictly controlled conditions.

• The observers are relevant experts who understand both the broad field in which the miracle is supposed to be occurring, and the different ways apparently miracular effects might be achieved naturalistically.

• The phenomenon is studied, not just observed. It is examined closely and carefully: measurements are taken, alongside certified contemporaneous records in multiple modalities appropriate to the period (writing, drawings, detailed diagrams, video and photographs where possible etc.).

• Alternate hypotheses are tested instead of just voiced. An attempt is made to, as it were, trouble the phenomenon as it occurs (for instance, people walking round and underneath St. Joseph as he “levitates”, putting a rope or hoop all around him to see if anything is holding him up, trying to pull him down etc.).

• An attempt is made to separate the phenomenon from its spiritual or religious context, as to reduce potential confabulation, contagion , and priming effects, etc.

Were a supposedly miracular phenomenon meet these sorts of broadly investigatory standards, it would begin to trouble my naturalism.

By contrast, miracle proponents seem to have an evidentiary standard something like this:

• A sufficient number of records of supposed witnesses to the phenomenon.

• The eyewitnesses did not have obvious reason to lie, embellish, or mistake their accounts.

• The individuals under consideration were, from reports, of good character, and seem to have had little reason to attempt to mislead others.

• Some set of reasons as to why God might have chosen to perform miracles in this particular case and in this particular way.

• Specific naturalistic theories fail to account for some elements of the reports (I will return to this below, because I think it is very important).

I think it’s fair to call this a historical approach to the phenomenon: they are seeking the sorts of inquiry we might normally use to gain confidence that a routine historical event occurred. They may require that a historical evidentiary standard be met to a particularly high degree - they may expect there to be lots of testimonial evidence, for instance, and expect it to be of especially high quality. But they are, at the end of the day, happy to accept testimonial evidence in favour of a miracle as long as it is “good enough” testimony.

So here is the basic distinction: I want an investigatory epistemic process, miracle proponents are content with a historical one. This explains our differing reactions: I am looking for things they don’t even try to provide. They say “These unimpeachable witnesses claim to have seen it!”; I want to know “Who measured, troubled, and tested it?” We are not evaluating the evidence by the same standard, so I am baffled when they confidently declare the epistemic standard has been met.

Unnecessary, Impossible, and Irreverent - Three Objections

When I demand that miracles be investigated, rather than simply witnessed, I frequently face three broad objections:

1. Investigation is unnecessary - testimony and other historical evidence is enough.

2. Investigation is impossible - supposed miracles cannot usually be investigated while they are happening, and certainly cannot be today, so it’s unfair to require that sort of process.

3. Investigation is irreverent- it is inappropriate seek scientific evidence for miracles, and we should be content with what we’ve got.

I disagree on all three counts.

Why We Must Investigate Miracles

While discussing the “Miracle of the Sun” at Fatima, I suggested that we needed more rigorous data collection and a broadly scientific approach to the phenomenon. Ethan Muse responded, in part:

“This is a selective demand for rigor that is only impressive to extremely biased skeptics that havent [sic] thought about it for more than 10 minutes.”

Another discussant wrote the following:

“[James] has to subject definitive evidence for the Catholic faith to this kind of legalistic, unreasonable cross-examination…some absurd, arbitrary standard applied contra the norms of common sense, historical inquiry, etc.”2

A third said:

“You seem to believe that people should not be confident in their beliefs about the events of history unless the interviews are taken in this meticulous, controlled setup that you are proposing. Well, you cannot believe anything about history that way.”3

These are examples of the idea that what I call “investigation” is unnecessary to support claims of a miracle. Essentially, this argument says “When you demand investigation, you are setting the evidentiary bar too high!”

This is mistaken.

Miracles are, by definition, highly unusual. The supposed repeated levitation and flight of a human being, or the supposed spinning and repeated falling of the sun, or the supposed spontaneous healing of a person are by no means standard historical events. For such claims to be true, numerous laws of physics would have to have been violated. The truth of such events would serve - by miracle proponents’ own accounts - as a stunning rebuke of naturalism in toto.

To vindicate such dramatic claims, the sort of evidence we use to justify belief in routine historical events is insufficient. The sort of evidence that justifies a belief that a person existed, gave religious teachings, was a monk, and had ecstatic visions (for example), will not serve to justify belief in them literally flying. Once you make that sort of claim, you need a different sort of evidence - and to get that evidence, you need a different epistemic posture.

This is for the basic Humean reason that uncontrolled historical testimony is unusually unreliable relative to physical evidence gathered under struct conditions. Joe James of Mitigated Skepticism has done an excellent job explaining why “there’s good reason to treat testimonial claims as non-evidential…[when testimonies are] attesting to highly improbable events”. I won’t rehash all his arguments - go read his piece! - but he concludes that “We should trust testimony in direct relation to the baseline probability of the event the testimony describes” - and, since miracles have a very low baseline probability, we should not consider testimony evidential when offered in support of miracle claims, because the chance that the testimony is flawed is much higher than the chance the event occurred.

I think this is basically correct, and I think our general epistemic practice confirms it. When we think about our own lives, and consider what claims we are willing to accept on the basis of uncontrolled witness testimony alone, I think most of us will find that the more extravagant the claim the more we want extra confirmation. And, if something really matters, we want to be sure.

A personal example: when my father was very ill with cancer, my mother told me he was close to death. I had known of his illness for a long time, had been preparing for that moment, had seen him getting sicker with my own eyes - so that was enough to bring me home to be with him. But when it came to planning the last days of his life - when the doctors were recommending he leave the hospital, forego further treatment, and go back home to die - I found I needed the doctors to confirm what my mother had said. It is not that I didn’t trust her witness - it was simply that for such a significant, important, decision, I wanted expert corroboration of what she had said. (And, yes, my father was going to die. He never got home from the hospital.)

When something really matters to us, we instinctively want more than just “somebody said this is true.” We want experts to tell us, we want evidence to show us, we want a process that gives us confidence in what is being said. This is entirely normal - and, I think, it applies to miracles. When it comes to the miracular, witness testimony alone is not enough - we do, in fact, need to investigate.

The Evidentiary Bar is Set by the Claim

When pushed on this point, miracle proponents will often respond that, while investigation of supposed miracles might be desirable, it is often impossible - and therefore (they seem to imply), to request it is unreasonable. We see this argument from one of my interlocutors on Fatima, who wrote:

“your proposal is very artificial because in an event like Fatima, where people believed the world was going to end, you seem to think that the proper way to collect the data was to line people up (~50,000 of them) and randomly shuffle them, and then randomly pick every 10th person to ensure as much statistical randomness as possible.”

Notice the structure of the argument: the request for a more scientific investigation of the phenomenon is called “artificial” and is rhetorically inflated to an impossible demand. This is then employed, by implication, to undermine the demand for investigation in toto. The options presented are, essentially, accept the available evidence, or demand impossible evidence.

A number of things are wrong here. First, the fact that it might seem “artificial” to set up a more controlled study of witnesses to a supposed miracle is a point more about how the epistemic mechanisms would feel, how they might violate the norms of the context in which the miracle is supposed to be occurring. I’ll explore this more below.

Second, while the exact method described would have been impossible, it would have by no means been impossible to set up a more rigorous process of interviewing witnesses afterwards. Investigators could have interviewed witnesses very quickly (instead of years later); they could have verified that the supposed witnesses were actually present; they could have used a standard interview protocol without leading questions etc. When an investigatory posture is presented as an impossible demand, ways to improve data gathering and analysis are obscured.

Finally, even if we were to accept that investigation is impossible in the case of many miracles, what follows from this? Many miracle proponents seem to believe that when an event in the past proved impossible to investigate we should be content with testimonial evidence. The impossibility of investigation is given as a reason (often through implication) to accept less compelling evidence. But this is a profound epistemic error: the quality of evidence required for a belief is independent of the quality of evidence available; the evidence available should discipline the conclusions we can draw, not determine our evidentiary standards.

Imagine a male high jumper says “I want to set a new world record in high jumping!” We then say “Great! The current world record is 2.45 metres. We’ll set the bar there.” The jumper runs, leaps, and sails gracefully through the air - under the bar. They then complain: “This is not fair! I wanted to set a world record, but I cannot jump 2.45 metres! You should lower the bar so I have a chance of getting over it!” This is wrongheaded: the bar is set where it is because of the task the jumper set themselves. So, too, with miracle claims: we set the evidentiary bar high because the claim is extravagant, and it does no good to complain if it cannot then be cleared. History does not provide sufficient evidence to warrant belief in all possible historical claims - some are unsupportable, and that is a problem with the claim, not with the evidentiary standard.

Investigation as Irreverence

The final objection suggests that to investigate a miracle - to demand more evidence from a miracle than witnesses provide - is somehow irreverent. It is harder to find explicit expressions of this objection, but it has become clear to me after years of having these discussions that something like this intuition is often at play. This explains, I think, why some miracle proponents get so angry when skeptics are unconvinced. In the few days I’ve been discussing miracle claims on Substack, I have received quite a lot of angry, unpleasant, and personal comments - unusual, given this is essentially an epistemic disagreement - and that speaks (I think) to a sense some people have that a request for more or better evidence is not just intellectually demanding, but inappropriate.

We get a hint of this view from my interlocutor from the previous section, who worried that there would be something “artificial” about scientifically sampling and polling witnesses to a miracle. Why would this matter? So what if there is something “artificial” about trying to shape our observation of a phenomenon rather than standing back and letting it run its course? That is how we get good data. A scientific experiment is highly “artificial”, in that it constructs an environment unlikely to occur in nature in order to isolate variables. This is epistemically good. So why not do that here? Because, I think, the individual in question would consider it inappropriate: this is not the attitude we should have toward such things. We should let the “miracle” play out, and watch in wonder.

This becomes further apparent when we consider the epistemic contexts in which miracles are most frequently believed to occur. Some contexts encourage epistemic engagement, people getting stuck in trying to figure something out - investigation. Others encourage epistemic disengagement, people as relatively passive audiences - witnesses. Consider magic shows. Many magic tricks are fragile: if you were to pick up the deck, open the magician’s jacket, or look under the table you would discover how they are done. But we don’t. We resist doing what we know might satisfy our curiosity because the context tacitly discourages it. We appreciate we are positioned, vis-à-vis the magic show, as an audience, not as a co-participant. Skepticism is allowed only within bounds; actual testing, never.

The settings in which many miracles are said to occur are, while not precisely the same, worryingly similar: they, too, tend to discourage epistemic intervention. This is why the actions of the woman in my opening vignette may provoke a shudder: they reveal a mismatch between two different epistemic contexts, and the expectations for inquiry formed by each.

We catch a whiff of this attitude, too, when believers chide skeptics for demanding more and better evidence, claiming that the demand comes not from legitimate epistemic expectations but from a resistance to belief. A lack of belief, given the available evidence, is characterised as a character flaw or spiritual failing, and is thus stigmatised. This, conveniently, removes from the believer the burden of articulating why the skeptic’s epistemic expectations are wrong: they are wrong because the skeptic is in the wrong. It is likely, had anyone acted like the woman in the vignette with which I opened this essay, she would have been vilified, perhaps even attacked - this indicates that people do, indeed, worry there is something inappropriate about investigating a miracle to closely.

But I think this is wrong - and here is, I think, my deepest objection to those who resist investigating miracles. I believe investigation is a form of reverence. Carl Sagan once called science “informed worship”, and this is part of what he meant: paying close attention, thinking carefully about what questions we ask witnesses and how we ask them, designing experiments and conducting them rigorously - these are ways we respect reality and each other. Respect reality, because this is the language reality speaks: we know things through interaction, through tests and trial, through troubling things. Respect each other, because this is how we best convince each other of what is true - and when we make an extravagant claim, we owe each other the best evidence we can possibly provide.

This suggests a different paradigm for the investigation of miracles: we could maximise our investigation of them. Imagine independent observation stations at every site at which miracles are believed to regularly occur, staffed by relevant experts ready to investigate when the need arises. Recording equipment to document everything in real time. Statisticians to design and perform appropriate analyses. Standard, pre-agreed protocols for the collection and storage of evidence. Full publication of results - positives and negatives - subject to peer review.

If tomorrow a priest were claimed to be regularly flying in Canterbury Cathedral, that’s the sort of process we should want: an earnest, honest attempt to find the truth, together.

Levitatio Investigata

Let us return to church, to our skeptical woman. We should be animated by her spirit. She, encountering the abnormal, was unafraid. She, in the face of social sanction, asked the uncomfortable question. She, in a context that encouraged passivity, actively tested a hypothesis. She, faced with an extravagant claim, realised the need for exceptional evidence.

She tugged on the ankles of reality, because she respected the truth.

Did the priest fake it, or was he flying?

To know, we must investigate.

It’s intriguing to see the development of my philosophical style: rooted in narrative, close to experience, informed by science and art. I write better now - I’m better at arranging sentences, better at structuring pieces, better at self-editing. I love that I end this piece with a return to the reader, a return to the “thisness” Goldstein describes in her book - but that move would be much more powerful had we begun there, were the piece a chiasm. But I had not discovered the chiasm back then (I now think the chiasm is the central Humanist existential movement - here → another part/different appreciation of here → here transformed).

As for the argument of the piece, I’m glad to see very early in my writing a resistance to the idea of the secular world as “disenchanted” - the book I am now writing is essentially a book-length rejection of that idea. I am much less concerned today with whether Humanism is a “religion” or not - who cares? And I don’t think any more of “reclaiming” transcendence from religion, of “taking back” spirituality from religious worldviews. Instead, I see experiences normally termed as “spiritual” and “transcendent” as fundamentally secular all along, and available to us all the time. We don’t have to “take back” what we already possess. I write about that here.

Humanism with a Soul

No less an atheist prophet than Sam Harris has defended, at length, both the use of the term “spiritual” and the value of the experiences to which the term usually applies. “We must reclaim good words and put them to good use”, he says, arguing that “transcendent experiences…should be studied scientifically”.

Cass Seltzer, hero of Rebecca Goldstein’s 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, would agree. Dubbed “the atheist with a soul”, Seltzer is a professor of the psychology of religion who sees in his work the possibility of developing a thoroughly naturalistic account of “religious” and “spiritual” experiences. Far from the stereotype of the disinterested scholar, however, Seltzer’s studies have personal resonance: he is himself prone to experiences of transcendence and awe, sometimes feeling the barriers between him and others slipping away, as if he were bathing in undifferentiated humanity.

I never had a “crisis of faith” – I never held to a faith which could face such a trial – but as a teenager I once, I am convinced, “transcended” my individual consciousness. I was preparing to sing some Elgar in a four-part harmony group, and we were preceded by another student playing the cello. Something about the event – the warmth of the hall on a winter’s night, the smiles on the faces of the audience, the exquisite mastery of the instrument on display, the excitement of my impending performance – served to trigger the most amazing sense in me, a feeling of happiness, well-being, awe, bigness-and-yet-smallness (as if I was both as big as the Cosmos and as tiny as a human in the Cosmos), contentment, and ease which I have rarely since had the shocking pleasure to undergo.

The performance passed in a blur – I remember only the rapturous response from the audience to what must have been an exceptional round of song. What remains with me much more vividly is that sense of exuberant joy and well-being with which I was visited that night: like liquid gold in your veins, like we are all connected with vibrating threads of energy which reach one to another.

For about a week, I was convinced I’d found God. Then I found Abraham Maslow.

Maslow’s book Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences describes perfectly what I had felt during that concert. His characterization of “peak experience” had all the hallmarks of my overwhelm: “feelings of limitless horizons opening up to the vision, the feeling of being simultaneously more powerful and also more helpless than one ever was before, the feeling of great ecstasy and wonder and awe, and the loss of placing in time and space”. Yes: this was it.

Surprisingly, perhaps, the discovery that my experience was entirely natural (even inducible through pharmacological intervention) did nothing to blunt its power or significance, nor to reduce my sense of excitement. The knowledge this was not God speaking to me, but rather my brain doing backflips, engendered in me not a jot of “disenchantment”. Instead, the revelation renewed my wonder at the capacity of our physical bodies to generate ineffable experiences, and committed me more fervently to a naturalistic worldview in which what awe there is to find will be found in the physical realm.

The tension between Seltzer’s knowledge of his own purely physical nature and his yearning for the mystical animates Goldstein’s work. The naturalist within him wars with his sense that there must be more, that bodies aren’t all there is. At the beginning of the book he chides himself for his transcendent turn of mind: “Cass knows he needs to tamp down his tendencies toward the transcendental. It isn’t becoming in America’s favorite atheist” (p.22). But it soon becomes apparent that this is something he is reluctant to part with:

“This expansion out into the world, which is a kind of love, he supposes, a love for the whole of existence, that could so easily well up in Cass Seltzer at this moment, standing here in the pure abstraction of this night and contemplating the strange thisness of his life when viewed sub species aeternitatis – that is to say, from the vantage point of eternity, which comes so highly recommended to us by Spinoza. Here it is, then: the sense that existence is just such a tremendous thing…” (p. 23-24)

I can relate. Although it may seem odd in an atheist activist, I value my “peak experiences” when I have them, even try to seek them out, “trick” myself into having them. Simply put, they feel magnificent, and I’m reluctant to allow squeamishness on the part of those who think such experiences are “too religious” to restrain me from attaining that sublime sense that “existence is just such a tremendous thing”.

Maslow has my back. “What seems to be emerging from this new source of data”, he says, “is that this essential core-religious experience may be embedded either in a theistic, supernatural context or in a non-theistic context. This private religious experience is shared by all the great world religions including the atheistic ones like Buddhism, Taoism, Humanism, or Confucianism” (p. 28 - yes, Humanism was still then considered a religion).

The true weight of Maslow’s argument here has, I think, been overlooked and underplayed: Maslow is arguing that “visions of God” – the revelations, the pious ecstasies which animated many great prophets and seers throughout millennia and across the globe – are nothing more nor less than the workings of the human organism under particular natural conditions. God is a state of mind – literally. These experiences are “phrased in terms of whatever conceptual, cultural, and linguistic framework the particular seer had available in his time” (p. 20) but are, nonetheless, entirely natural.

This strongly suggests that Seltzer need not be so embarrassed about his “tendencies toward the transcendental”, because an atheist can just as happily lay-claim to “peak experience” as any theist (or deist, for that matter). But perhaps we can go further? Perhaps we can say that it is the atheist and the naturalist who can lay true claim to the loftiest heights of spiritual experience precisely because they are entirely natural, and because it is the non-theist who recognizes them as such. That it is the religious “framework” which has been placed atop such experiences which is the illegitimate and distorting view?

Maslow himself seems to recognize such a possibility. The “highest spiritual values appear to have naturalistic sanctions and…supernatural sanctions for these values are, therefore, not necessary” (p. 36), he says, before quoting John MacMurray:

“Now is the point in history at which it becomes possible for man to adopt consciously as his own purpose the purpose which is already inherent in his own nature.” (p. 39)

What would it take for Humanists to take back spirituality, to re-cognize transcendence, to infuse Humanism with a “soul” it has hitherto been lacking? How can we all, like Cass Seltzer, become “atheists with a soul”? Maslow suggests that “In their revolt against the organized, institutionalized churches, [non-theists] have unwittingly accepted the immature and naïve dichotomy between traditional religion (as the only carrier of values), on the one hand, and, on the other, a totally mechanistic, reductionistic, objectivistic, neutral, value-free science” (p. 40). In so doing, he argues, Humanism “leave[s] out too much that is precious to most human beings” (p. 40).

We need not fully agree with Maslow’s characterization here to recognize that there is some truth to his charge: Humanism has traditionally “left out” much of human value from its purview. In banishing God we have too often also banished those practices we deem too closely associated with “religion”: communal song, ceremony, ritual, meditative contemplation, awe and wonder, even story, myth, and fable. All these have been exorcised from Humanism like so many ghosts – and the transcendental is the most abhorred specter of all. Like Seltzer, we think transcendent experience does not become we atheists, so tainted it is by close association with the dogma and authoritarianism of traditional religion.

I want it back. Religion cannot keep transcendence to itself. Under the auspices of a new Humanism these areas of value will retake their place in the pantheon of human experience, reconceived and better-understood as the natural expressions of a biological organism that they truly are. No longer will we wall-off some of the very finest pleasures of existence under the belief that they are “not becoming” of atheists, denying ourselves the full richness of life to avoid being tarred with a “religious” brush.

And if this confronts us with some challenging contradictions, then so much the better. For, as Goldstein reminds us at the close of her novel, “to be human is to inhabit our contradictions…we try, as best we can, to do justice to the tremendousness of our impossible existence” (p. 344). To do full justice to the tremendousness of our existence – this one existence we know we have – will require us Humanists to rediscover our “soul”. We must take seriously that there are sides to our experience which have for centuries been colonized by religions, but which could be reclaimed – natural experiences which can now be liberated from their supernatural dungeon and brought into the light of reason. We must take back communal song, and wild dance, and myth, and ritual, and wonder. We must reach for the Olympian peaks of transcendence even though we realize that, atop those peaks, no Gods reside.

So here I sit, in a room that is perhaps over-warm but which is perfect on a cold fall night, surrounded by friends of the Humanist persuasion, tapping at the shallow keys on my laptop. And there you sit, dear reader, reading this perhaps at a desk, or in a coffee shop, or on a train or, if you are lucky, tucked up in bed. Let us both stop a while, allow ourselves to inhabit this thisness, and strive for “the sense that existence is just such a tremendous thing”…!

It’s perfectly natural.

Scoring highly on a philosophy exam is, contrary to many people’s expectations, quite a difficult task.

Scoring exceptionally highly is almost impossible - but I did it: as an undergraduate at Cambridge I gained a starred first in my philosophy of education final.

The following blog post is an outline of my approach to acing exams. I am not arguing that this is the only way (or even the easiest way) to achieve a starred first in a philosophy examination. Rather, this guide offers a way to maximise the risks so that you can be entirely unsure you’ll receive your degree at all. It is advice I hope no one will follow, or ever have to follow.

This is simply what worked for me.

Section 1 - Singing

I always sing before exams. I’ve done this since I was a teenager. I find a small room, preferably with a piano, and let my voice fly. I begin with a warm-up: scales, arpeggios, sirens and fricatives. Then, I bring out my favourites: Bruckner’s Os Justi for a rich, intense beginning; Copeland’s Ching-a-Ring Chaw! to end with an energetic bang.

This day - the day of my Philosophy of Education final exam - was no different. I needed to focus, because these exams were important: at Cambridge, exams in the final year determine your entire degree classification, and you cannot resit or defer them. You get one chance. No do-overs. So, I slipped down the corridor near the porter’s lodge, found my favourite practice room, and lost myself in singing. I sang, and sang, and sang. By the time my practice was over, I felt focused, revved-up, locked-in - ready to take on the world.

Section 2 - Being Very Late

I emerged from the practice room at 9:25 and returned to the porter’s lodge: the examination room was right next to it, and students always gathered here before exams. Except there were no students here. I was confused: normally, the antechamber was abuzz with nervous energy, but now it was eerily silent.

I approached the porters. “Where is everybody for the Philosophy of Education exam that starts at 9:30?”, I asked worriedly. “They are taking the Philosophy of Education exam that started at 9”, they replied regretfully.

Ah.

This was a three-hour examination. It would help determine the outcome of three years of study, and could shape the rest of my life. I had missed a sixth of it through singing.

“Thank you!”, I said, cheerily as I could manage - at Oxbridge, it’s vitally important to stay on the good side of the porters, even in extremis. I turned on my heel and walked briskly to the auditorium in which the examination was ongoing, took a breath, and entered.

Every head looked up. I saw my philosophy tutor, garbed in academic dress. He glared at me uncomprehendingly. I affected my most confident smile, nodded to him, took my place at my assigned desk, and began to write.

Section 3 - Write Prodigiously

I wrote furiously. I have never written so fast in my life. My handwriting is bad at the best of times, but now it was a frantic scrawl, the scribbles of a spider on speed. I knew immediately I’d have to make up lost time, but to make things easier on my examiners I double-spaced everything: I wanted to give them at least a fighting chance of reading my work.

I entered a flow state. The words would not stop coming. The double-spacing, combined with my frenzied rapidity, meant I got through exam booklets fast. I filled the three I had been given within the first hour. I kept having to wave over examiners to ask for more. “More?!”, they asked, incredulous. “Yes,” I whispered, “MORE!”

Section 4 - Time on the Toilet

This was OK! I was doing it! Somehow, the adrenaline from realising I was horribly late to a critical exam was working in my favour! I was attacking the questions with ferocity, I was writing so much! I was unstoppable!

I was not, in fact, unstoppable. The adrenaline that was fueling my writing also acted on my innards and, at about the first hour mark, I knew I had to use the toilet (it’s gross but it is true and I am a philosopher, I am committed to the truth!).

This is a complex procedure. During a Cambridge final, you cannot merely slip out to the loo: you must be accompanied by an invigilator. So, not only had I endured the embarrassment of entering the exam hall late, but I also had to endure the embarrassment of being accompanied out of it, and escorted to the toilet. And not just once - I had to visit the lavatory three times during the three-hour exam.

This was strangely clarifying. It gave my thinking a natural rhythm: intense focus punctuated by almost Zen-like states of contemplation as I sat in splendid isolation. Write-poop-write-poop-write-poop-write. It was a spiritual practice. It informed the ideas. I recommend it.

Section 5 - Draw Silly Diagrams

My best idea, I maintain to this day, was drawing. One question was on existentialist approaches to education, and I was trying to express the idea of “empathetic challenging”, in which a teacher helps a student develop by pushing and stretching them - but empathetically.

I decided this needed a diagram. It simply could not be expressed in words. I began to draw: a sort of amoebic blob represented the student’s current capabilities, while a series of arrows pushed at the edges of the blob from within, representing the “challenging” (to capture the “empathetic” nature of the challenging, I tried to make the arrows look kind). This took up half a page, requiring me to request yet another booklet. The examiner looked worried, even faintly afraid, but I was proud of my drawing.

Sartre would have loved it.

Conclusion

I finished with 20 minutes to spare. I had missed half an hour. So, in total, I completed the examination in 2 hours 10 minutes. Who needs three hours? I spent the time reviewing my answers and (mainly) perfecting my diagram. The arrows looked too mean.

After I left, I learned my college had, noticing my absence, sent friends out to find me. I had gathered a reputation, apparently, for being a little reckless and interested in deschooling and alternative education. There was some worry I was purposefully missing the exam as a form of protest or performance art. But, in fact, I had simply been absorbed in art, and am a muppet.

I spent the rest of exam period worried about this specific exam: it was the only one, after all, I had been late to. So, when the results were published, this was the one I looked for first.

I scored an 81. A “starred first”. The highest mark I received for any of my exams, and I believe the highest in the university in that exam that year. This helped me win some academic prizes, including my college’s Foundation Award for getting a first in every single one of my final exams (not-so-humble brag).

That covers the basic approach I would not take to acing a philosophy exam. If you stick to this method, then I would be surprised if you got a starred first. But this is of course a lot of work to do. You can’t avoid the most difficult parts of this process (the time on the toilet), and unless your body cooperates you cannot significantly reduce the time spent here. If you do find yourself arriving very late to an exam, you might want to contact your lecturer for advice or, better yet, avoid being a fool like me in the first place.

16 years ago, I came out of the closet. I had struggled for ten years with my sexuality. I was in Café Lafitte in Exile in New Orleans - the oldest gay bar in America - at the end of a spring break service trip. I don't know exactly why I went. It was the first gay bar I’d been to on my own. It was rammed, tens of people crammed together, pushing toward the bar.

A man came up behind me and put his hands on my hips to shift me to the side. Leaned in close to my ear. Said "Excuse me darlin'."

A thrill went through my body. All internal walls fell. I suddenly recognised myself. I got my body back. I had been exiled from my body by myself and suddenly I had it back, and the possibilities seemed endless. It was erotic, but also existential - a phase-shift in self-understanding. Ten years of shame and doubt melted in the heat of a southern drawl. I could suddenly sing the song of myself.

I was 27.

One of the first things I did was join a local group of queer activists, and with them I marched in my first Pride parade. I remember it so well, marching through Boston on a sweltering summer’s day, chanting:

“We’re here, we’re queer, we’re fabulous – come march with us!”

We kept going up to bystanders watching in the crowd and inviting them to step off the sidewalk and into the streets. We didn’t care that this wasn’t allowed: we wanted people to participate, not just spectate. “Come be part of the movement!” By the end of the march our contingent had grown significantly.

We did some cool stuff together. After the CEO of Chick-fil-A declared his opposition to same-sex marriage, we drove miles to find one, so we could hold a kiss-in outside it. We protested a conference on Harvard’s campus attended by some supporters of draconian anti-LGBTQ laws in Uganda, not seeking to shut it down, but certainly seeking to disrupt it. We even infiltrated a conversion therapy conference, sending some of our members inside to report back. I remember sitting with the infiltrators afterwards, listening to the hatred they had heard, and crying.

Our goal was queer liberation. Not equality, not acceptance even - liberation. We desired not absorption into the sexual, gender, and relationship norms of straight US society, but a renegotiation of those norms, a new compact that would open possibilities for queer and cis/straight people alike.

Not conditional acceptance, but a change in the conditions of acceptance.

We were trouble. Good trouble.

My gayness came to me in a moment of bodily, erotic, existential, even mystical alignment, then. My body thrummed with it, and as the vibrations spread outward I embraced a life of activism. I think of that today and hear Walt Whitman:

Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

Whoever degrades another degrades me,
And whatever is done or said returns at last to me…

I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy,
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms…

Through me forbidden voices,
Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil,
Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur’d…

I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.

Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from,
The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,
This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.

That was how it felt, that humid March day in New Orleans, when I was 27, newly gay, and free.

Be Just Like Us!

12 years ago, Matthew Vines’ book God and the Gay Christian was published. It charted Vines’ attempt, as a gay man from a Christian household, to reconcile the teachings of scripture with a limited acceptance of gay people. I say “limited acceptance” because Vines’ project has always been assimilationist: he was seeking the incorporation of same-sex relationships into a conservative Christian sexual ethic.

I wrote at the time:

Vines’ view - alongside that of many “accepting” evangelicals - is in fact still a deeply conservative view of human sexuality and relationships. His “affirmation” of LGBTQ sexuality extends precisely as far as the edge of the marital bed. Vines believes that sexual same-sex relationships are OK as long as they occur within the confines of a marriage…

…This is not a leap forward for sexual freedom and autonomy: it is the loosening, ever so slightly, of an inhumane stricture just enough so that it can bind LGBTQ people within it.

I appreciated then that Vines’ project represents a positive movement within conservative Christian circles: of course greater acceptance is to be celebrated. But I saw that the structure of his argument, while widening the range of morally acceptable romantic and sexual relationships slightly, was not liberatory. It sought to slightly expand an existing frame, not to question the normative assumptions of that frame. The acceptance of gay people within Christianity is made conditional on us accepting the normative assumptions Christianity seeks to impose.

While Vines’ argument only pressured queer Christians, I was content to be a critic from outside: while I think conservative Christian morality is wrong, it is not for me to decide how Christians resolve their scriptural disputes. But now Vines is back - and this time he wants to put his straightjacket on me.

And not in a good way.

This week, the New York Times published I’m Gay, Not Queer. It Matters. In it, Vines makes precisely the move I criticised more than a decade ago - now generalised to the whole LGBTQIA+ movement. Back then, Vines argued that gay Christians could be accepted as Christians if they accepted the sexual norms of his form of Christianity: covenant, monogamy, marriage, and biblical authority. Today, he argues that LGBTQIA+ people can preserve acceptance as citizens if we return to the social norms of the marriage-equality era: moderation, dignity, sameness, and reassurance to the mainstream.

Vines’ argues that, since the heady days of the campaign for marriage equality, the argument for gay rights has shifted. It used to be based on the idea that gay people cannot choose to be gay - born this way baby! - and on the insistence that gay people just want to be included in existing social structures like marriage - love is love!

Now, however, a more oppositional, even anti-normative mode has increasingly taken over. As the word “queer” has become more popular, the “once-clear public message about who gay people are” has become “muddled”, and “Being gay begins to look less like an inborn trait and more like a chosen ideology or aesthetic.” This “undermines a core premise behind gay rights: that sexual orientation isn’t chosen” - and “this is not a confusion that gay people can afford”.

He implies that this new situation is the cause, at least in part, of “conservative Christians grow[ing] noticeably more guarded [regarding LGBTQ issues] in recent years”. He attributes to it some of “the sharp recent drop among Republicans in support for marriage equality”. And he warns, ominously, that some conservative Christians “have become increasingly alarmed by their sense that the L.G.B.T.Q. movement lacks clear limiting principles.”

In response, Vines suggests - well, what does he suggest, precisely? Here, having given his diagnosis, he is suspiciously vague about the remedy. We can get a sense of what he wants when he worries that “losing the clarity and moderation of the message that once appealed to a majority” of Republicans “cannot have helped.” But the closest he comes to a prescription is in his final paragraph:

“The gay rights movement changed the world — and changed my life — by showing that being gay is not a rebellion against ordinary life. It is simply one way of living it, every bit as dignified and human as being straight. As support for gay rights begins to wane, we urgently need to regain the clarity of that simple, transformational message.”

From this we can construct, through implication, what Vines seems to be asking of the LGBTQIA+ community:

• Recover the “clarity and moderation” of the same-sex marriage campaign

• Do not position “being gay as a rebellion against ordinary life”

• Reassure conservative Christians that the LGBTQ movement has “clear limiting principles”

To which I respond: no thank you! This is a rainbow straightjacket: accept existing social norms to achieve conditional acceptance. This risks making our acceptance contingent and fragile, and robs the queer movement of its greatest liberatory potential: to free all people, queer or not, from stultifying, life-denying assumptions.

Assimilation or Liberation?

Here we have dramatised in miniature an ever-present tension within LGBTQIA+ life:

Gay assimilation or queer liberation?

This tension is both strategic and substantive. The obvious difference is between two different theories of social change. The gay assimilationist says “If we make ourselves as much like them as possible - unthreatening, presentable, normal - how can they possibly keep us out of their club?” The queer liberationist is less compromising. They say “If you don’t let us have access to the goods you’ve locked inside your club, we’ll break the bloody door down - or shift the foundations beneath your feet.”

The gay assimilationist theory of change is historically inaccurate and politically naïve. Historically inaccurate, because major movements for social change have never achieved their goals by making marginalised communities maximally palatable to hegemonic majorities. Rather they organise, build power and wield that power to reshape society. I am reminded of Frederick Douglass’ famous quote: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

This is certainly true of the gay rights movement. We did not simply present the world with a sanitised version of gay life, lamenting “It’s not our fault we are gay!”, approaching the world with a begging bowl while pleading “We are just like you!” We built community, coalitions, and power.

Harvey Milk understood this: yes, he cut his hair and put on a suit when he ran for office - a strategic concession to attain public legibility - but he knew the most powerful thing queer people could do was to come out, and then to join with each other and with other communities in political solidarity. He remained bravely, insistently, defiantly, publicly gay, infuriating the existing, more assimilationist gay establishment in the process - and was killed for it. He didn’t normalise, he organised. And so too the whole movement: we refused to be silent, refused to be invisible, refused to compromise our safety for their comfort, found others like us, found allies for us, built a power base, and leveraged our power through protest and at the ballot box.

We did not make ourselves palatable: we made ourselves visible, then powerful, then inevitable.

Assimilationism is politically naïve, because it misunderstands how normative structures function to exclude and demean marginalised people. The theory of the assimilationist is essentially this: “If we make ourselves maximally similar to the in-group, they will only have to expand their circle of belonging ever so slightly to include us! So, let’s make it easy for them!” It is imagined that the safest place for marginalised people to be is as close to hegemonic power as possible.

But if a normative framework only requires a tiny tweak to include someone, it only requires a tiny tweak in the other direction to exclude them again. Because the acceptance is conditional, the conditions of acceptance can always be revoked. Acceptance gained through assimilation is imagined as especially secure, but is in fact unusually fragile: a change in the cultural winds can push you outside the circle of concern again.

This is partly why Vines’ strategy has not worked, even within its own dedicated sphere. I can’t help noticing that Vines, when describing his very own marriage, notes that it had to be conducted in a church “that had broken away from the traditionalist Southern Baptist Convention” because it wanted to be more accepting of LGBTQIA+ people. The SBC itself is still formidably opposed to such acceptance: in 2025 the delegates to the SBC national meeting overwhelmingly voted for the “overturning of laws and court rulings, including Obergefell v. Hodges, that defy God’s design for marriage and family” - a move that would result in an effective nationwide ban on same-sex marriage. Change could not be achieved within that frame: it required rupture from it.

This reveals a vital truth: when you leave in place the conservative Christian normative machinery that excluded queer people from full participation in the first place - ideas about gender complementarity, procreation, male headship etc. - and argue for participation based on the condition that you meet other expectations of that same machinery - covenantal marriage, chastity, normative gender presentation etc. - your acceptance will always depend on which parts of the machinery are operating most strongly at a particular time. Your place is never secure.

So, too, in society at large: assimilation to traditional, “moderate”, “limited” norms of straight/cis society will not secure our acceptance. The world does not need the word “queer” to hate us: plenty of people hated us before that word was one we used for ourselves. While they are trapped in a set of conservative values around sex and gender, our existence will always present an embodied challenge to that normative view. This is why Vines is simply wrong when he says “there is nothing inherently radical or subversive about being gay.” Sadly, we don’t get to define that! Whether our existence as same-sex loving people is perceived as inherently radical or subversive depends on others’ moral frames - and plenty of people frame us as exactly that.

You can make your marriage as normie as you like, but they won’t forget that at the end of the day, two dudes are sharing a bed.

The only way to secure acceptance for queer people is to challenge and reshape the deep normative frame that excluded us in the first place. Not tweak it, not pull on the blanket so it covers us too: reshape the frame. We do this by troubling normative assumptions across the board: Why should a marriage look like that anyway? Why should a family have a mother and a father? Why should sex just be about procreation? Then, we rebuild a normative frame that more naturally includes us.

Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

Finally, Vines’ assimilationism is morally suspect, because it makes Vines’ own personal trajectory the standard against which others are judged, and the limiting horizon of what they are allowed to dream. I was moved to read Vines’ account of his own teenage discovery of queer freedom. He writes:

Watching committed same-sex couples be welcomed into the institution of marriage transformed my sense of self-worth, allowing me to envision for the first time a dignified future as an openly gay person.

I am genuinely happy for you, Matthew. But what works for you may not work for others. You may wish for inclusion into society’s existing sex and gender norms, but many need those norms to change more dramatically to be fully free. By making your desires the furthest limit of the queer movement’s ambitions, you abandon those people.

Do not make your conditions of liberation my conditions of subjugation.

I Want a Queer Nation!

The most tragic failure of Vines’ approach to queer politics, though, is that it obscures its greatest liberatory potential. The promise of queer liberation is not for queer people alone. The anti-sex, anti-pleasure, rigid-gender norms that harm queer people harm all people. They harm us the most, but they harm cis/straight too. And so, when we are fighting to reshape them, we are fighting to free cis/straight people too. We are performing a service for humankind.

I began with Walt Whitman. I end with the Queer Nation manifesto. This is not as strange a coupling as it may seem, because in truth they are animated by the same spirit. Vines reads the manifesto and sees only “adversarial charge”. He positions it as a dangerous holdover from the AIDS crisis-era, something the movement should have grown out of, something that makes polite society afraid and suspicious of us.

I read it and see anger, yes. Hurt, certainly. Rage, sometimes. So much heartbreak. The tiny vignettes of AIDS deaths and our attempt to scream “WE MATTER!” break my heart. But there is also hunger, life, and possibility. Read properly, the Queer Nation manifesto is nothing more nor less than Whitman’s insight in a different register:

Through me forbidden voices…

Being queer means leading a different sort of life…on the margins, defining ourselves…gender-fuck and secrets,

“I believe in the flesh and the appetites…”

“every body…is a world of pleasure waiting to be explored.”

“Divine am I inside and out…”

“Everyone of us is a world of infinite possibility.”

While the manifesto is certainly a catalogue of opposition, it is more profoundly an expression of hope and faith. Hope for a world in which queer people would not have to fight, because our love-force has reshaped things, and faith in the possibility of creating such a world:

We have so much to fight for.

We are an army of lovers.

A city and a country where we can be safe and free and more.

We must look at our lives and see what's best in them

In this conjunction of Whitman and Queer Nation lives in embryo the possibility of a different normative frame. For there is nothing “un-American” about this, nothing alien to the American spirit at its best. Whitman was the poet-prophet of democracy, and Queer Nation’s manifesto was the American ecstatic-democratic tradition reborn for a new age and in a new voice.

Queer Nation is “Ain’t I a Woman?”. It is “I have a Dream!" It is “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” It is the poetry of Audre Lorde, the prose of James Baldwin, the cries of “Black Lives Matter!” Each voice in this tradition sings, in its own tone and timbre, “your norm of the human is too small - expand it!”

This is the American radical-democratic tradition: not a polite request for admission, but a vital demand to reshape the room.

Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

Queer Nation were speaking the pass-word primeval, but Vines could only hear a roar of opposition.

Come March With Us!

My faggot-counter reset last week. After years without incident, a woman called me “faggot” on the street. And then she followed me home. So I feel the urgency that provokes Vines’ article. Things are getting worse for us - the figures he cites about reduced support for our community are real.

But this is not because of the use of the term Queer by more LGBTQIA+ people. It is not because of some lapse in message discipline, a failure to hold the party line. It is because a poisonous political project has once again singled us out for marginalisation, and is actively using our existence - particularly trans people’s existence - as a wedge with which to pry apart the political compact.

We cannot fight this with polite entreaties: we must fight it with political power.

So, Matthew, I end with an invitation, drawn from the words of our Queer Nation siblings:

How can I tell you. How can I convince you, brother, that your life is in danger. You as an alive and functioning queer are a revolutionary. We must fight for ourselves (no else is going to do it). Let's make every space a Lesbian and Gay space. A city of yearning and then total satisfaction. A city and a country where we can be safe and free and more.

Remember there is so, so little time.

Step off the sidewalk and into the street.

Next year, we march naked.

It is September 2024, and Dr. Jordan Bernt Peterson, Dr. Bret Weinstein, and Dr. Heather Heying are dreaming. Together they imagine an epochal event, a moment that will turn the world upon its axis and set everything right. A gathering of religious leaders, musicians, pop culture icons, and heterodox thinkers to enflame the passions of the youth and secure the future of the West. They call it

The Rally to Rescue the Republic.

Their hopes for the rally - Weinstein’s brainchild - could hardly be headier:

We are hoping it is an event in the same way that Woodstock was a music festival. We are hoping…that this is a moment at which we first see a sea change in the way we conduct ourselves and interact with each other. I think of it…as, hopefully, the book-end that closes the era that opened with Woodstock and opens the next era in which we recognize just how much we have in common, [and] just how much we have to lose if our system fails - which it seems to be doing in front of our eyes.

Peterson dubs it “Woodstock for the Adventurous and Responsible.” Far out. I can hear the theme tune now:

This is the dawning of the Age of Aquinas
Age of Aquinas
Aquinas!
Aquinas!

Hierarchy and maps of meaning
Clean your room and stop your dreaming
Set your house in perfect order
Build the wall and guard the border
Neuro-logic revelation
And voluntary submission, Aquinas!
Aquinas!

The Rally did indeed occur, on September 29, 2024. It brought together such luminaries as keynote speaker Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; Russell Brand, who faces multiple charges including rape and sexual assault, all of which he denies; then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard; and AIDS and COVID-19 conspiracist Lara Logan. These intellectual and political powerhouses were interspersed by musical performances from DPAK, Zuby, and Skillet. Of course, Peterson, Weinstein, and Heying were there too.

This was a cultural moment.

It did not Rescue the Republic. Nor did it usher in a sea change in human relations. Nor did it open a new era of recognition of our commonality. I can honestly say, after watching all 7 hours, 16 minutes, and one second of the live stream, I was left with the feeling that I lack commonality with most of the speakers.1

But the Rally to Rescue the Republic did achieve one thing: it provided, in miniature, an exemplification of a new cultural form that has developed in the past decade or so, the reactionary twin of the New Age movement and a dark shadow of the 60-70s counterculture New Age developed from.

I call it “Old Age”.

Old Age Spirituality

In short, Old Age spirituality is a cultural expression that takes a similar structural form to New Age spirituality, and shares certain key features both with New Age itself and with the 60-70s counterculture that preceded it.2 But it reverses the polarity of a number of its central ideological commitments. This makes it a movement riven with internal contradictions, as I shall explore - but similarities first.

What’s New is Old Again

Both New Age and Old Age spirituality are forms of what has been called "new-ancient” thought. Ancient eastern philosophies felt new to Americans in the 60s-80s, and that strangeness and newness helped them feel countercultural. Today, Ancient Orthodox and traditional Catholic expressions play a similar role: they are prized because they are unlike what participants feel the broader culture is offering them.

Both movements represent an individualisation and inward turning of a prior counter-cultural movement that had a more collective and political expression. For New Age thought, the progenitor was the counterculture of the 60’s and 70’s - hippies and free love. For Old Age thought, the progenitor is the tea party and the conservative counterculture of the early 2000s, which became MAGA.

Both focus on forms of individual responsibility over collective action, stressing that the problems in your life can be solved by your individual approach to life. In New Age thought, this takes the form of manifesting: by aligning your thoughts with the universe you can get what you want. In Old Age thought, this is expressed more in terms of discipline: stand up straight! Clean your room! In both, the direction of travel is toward the individual and away from structural social critiques. This does not mean the movements are apolitical: the leaders of the Old Age movement are majorly engaged in politics. But the focus tends towards the individual and away from the structural.

Relatedly, there is a strong self-improvement ethic in both movements - it’s just the methods of self-improvement are different. Yoga gives way to attending Orthodox church - although, intriguingly, meditation persists in both.

Both New Age and Old Age offer a form of eclecticism and perennialism. This is obvious when it comes to New Age thought, which is explicitly syncretic, treating religious and spiritual traditions like a grand metaphysical bazaar from which the seeker can purchase insights. Old Age might seem at first to be against this, with its insistence on “right” and “wrong” ways of doing religion, but look deeper and the same instinct emerges. Jordan Peterson, for instance, bungs together Jungian archetypes, existentialism, the Old Testament, and neuroscientific musings to address problems he claims to be perennial.

This links to another shared feature: the fusion of science and spirituality. In New Age you get forms of quantum mysticism like Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics; in Old Age you get cog-sci spirituality like John Vervaeke and Christopher Mastropietro’s Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, in which the authors seek to “reinterpret the Buddha’s pronouncements” in light of “our scientific worldview”.3

New Age and Old Age spirituality have similar mechanisms of dissemination, too: an ecosystem of seminars and conferences headlined by gurus (though, in the case of Old Age, much of this was born online). Retreats with Ram Dass become summits with Jonathan Pageau, Esalen becomes Peterson Academy, but the structure is similar.

Likewise, both are invested in the heavy marketisation of spirituality - they sell everything they can. An excellent video on New Age by YouTuber Religion for Breakfast quotes Dr. Guy Redden of the University of Sydney, who writes: “New Age activities are largely commodified in the fundamental fee-for-access sense.” The same is true of Old Age activities. Think the ARC Conference (£20 for 10 days access to the livestream, £1,500 for a ticket to the conference itself), and Peterson Academy again (now $599 a year or lifetime access for $4,499 at standard prices. This doesn’t include any of the merch - a Fighting Lobster cropped t-shirt for $48, anyone?).

Both New Age and Old Age seek the integration of religion and spirituality with other forms of life. Woodstock opened with a prayer from Swami Satchidananda, who led the crowd in a Sanskrit chant; the Rally to Rescue the Republic followed the US National Anthem with a prayer from Bishop Carlos Mendez leading a chant of “God Bless America”.

New Age and Old Age spirituality both have a penchant for massive, integrative intellectual frameworks. Instead of narrow, precise formulations that try to solve discrete problems, everything is brought together under one attempt at integrative understanding. Think of Iain McGilchrist’s use of the difference between brain hemispheres to explain huge societal changes, or Jonathan Pageau’s “symbolic world” in which everything is understood through a rather thin approach to symbolic relations.

A skepticism of existing institutions unites New Age and Old Age, too - though the targeted institutions tend to be different. The 60s counterculture and New Age thought tended to resist hierarchical, traditionalistic, and militaristic institutions - the police, the military, the nuclear family. Old Age often valourises those institutions, while attacking universities, cultural industries like Hollywood, and the medical establishment (a target it does share with New Age).

Indeed, this skepticism is most pronounced in a resistance to medical science on the part of both New Age and Old Age thinkers. But while New Age medical skepticism generally manifested in individual reluctance to engage with “mainstream medicine”, Old Age medical skepticism is a full-on assault on specific areas of science. Old Age is a movement full of COVID denialists and conspiracists - in fact, the pandemic was one of the major incubators of this whole movement.

Finally, the ideas of New and Old Age spirituality are often expressed with a profound lack of clarity, either through the use of endless mind-numbing jargon, or through the presentation of extremely vague arguments. To give an example, here is a passage excerpted for criticism in The Times’ review of Jordan Peterson’s We Who Wrestle With God:

“Adam has just been confirmed in his role as describer and delineator of the world; he is the locus of the differentiated consciousness upon which being and becoming themselves somehow mysteriously depend.”

OK.

The cumulative effect of these parallels is a movement that is similar in form to New Age spirituality - so similar as to seem its structural twin. But it is not the same.

Reversing the Polarity

There are many, important differences between New Age and Old Age, too - and here the distinctive features of the new movement come into view. What we see, repeatedly, is that Old Age reverses the political, social, and even aesthetic polarity of New Age beliefs, creating a sort of Mirror Universe version - in Weinstein’s case, complete with goatee.

Most obviously, while New Age is an imaginatively progressive movement, Old Age is regressive. New Age looked forward to the future and the creation of a new world of peace and understanding. Old Age looks back, hoping for the restoration of a world now passed - it is restorationist, afraid of the future. It is this posture that primarily motivates my preferred term for it: it wants the old world, not the new.

We see also, in a series of specific political issues, a concern for order and hierarchy over the ethic of individual liberation that characterises New Age thinking. New Age lauds sexual freedom, Old Age sexual restraint. New Age embraced feminism, Old Age seeks to restore traditional gender roles. New Age and the 60s counterculture was friendlier to LGBTQ+ rights and the full liberation of gender and sexual minorities, while Old Age is broadly queerphobic (remember, Jordan Peterson came to fame arguing against laws seeking to protect trans people). New Age wanted liberation from the nuclear family, Old Age wants to bring it back to prominence. New Age and the 60s counterculture was anti-militaristic, while Old Age is combative, especially in defense of “the West”, especially against the perceived threat of Islam.

New Age and Old Age also take different approaches to religious syncretism. I said above that both are syncretic, and that is true. But they do it differently: New Age says “All religions are paths to the same truth”, while Old Age tends to say “Only these, preferred religions are paths to truth - but we can mix them with a bunch of stuff from science and psychology.” There is a clear religious hierarchy in Old Age that is anathema to New Age openness: forms of religion perceived as older and more traditional at the top, ones deemed newer and more progressive toward the bottom, and nonreligion and Islam on the lowest rung (again, an obsession with the supposed dangers of Islam is a distinguishing feature of Old Age thinking).

Similarly, while New Age seeks liberation from traditional religious forms (which are perceived as a sort of spiritual straightjacket), Old Age seeks to return people to traditional religious forms. We see this in the growth of interest, in certain corners of the web, in traditional Catholicism (TradCaths) and Christian Orthodoxy, and in relentless attacks on religious liberalism and progressivism.

Finally, while New Age hoped for a world of peace, and harmony - and was generally optimistic about achieving it - Old Age offers a clash of civilisations narrative in which “the West” is in deadly competition with undermining and opposing forces - usually postmodernism, “woke ideology”, and Islam. To put it simply, New Age is millenarian, Old Age is apocalyptic.

Groovy to Grim

Some of these differences inform the profound aesthetic disjunction between the two movements. Imagine the fashion of the 60s-70s counterculture and the New Age movement and your mind will conjure flowing natural fabrics, fluttering fringes, psychedelic tie-dye and paisley, crystal pendants and jangling bangles. Peace signs, puffed sleeves, bellbottom jeans, Afghan coats, luscious locks, androgynous lewks. Gurus representing, borrowing from, or appropriating whatever tradition.

It was a vibe.

If the Old Age guru has a costume, it is the suit. Either the sombre, serious suits of Cambridge philosopher, theologian, and Peterson fellow traveler James Orr, or the heavily symbolic custom suits of Jordan Peterson.

Peterson’s suits are especially interesting, because they operate as a symbolic representation of his core ideas - and, by extension, the ideas of the whole movement. Often, these symbolisations are extraordinarily explicit. The suit in the image above - Peterson’s “Heaven and Hell” suit, which he wore to the Rally to Rescue the Republic - could not be more obvious. He’s literally wearing the movement’s heart on its sleeve.4

This feels aesthetically forced. There is nothing subtle or winsome about a Jordan Peterson suit: the symbol is denotative. Heaven → Blue. Hell → Red. Simplistic. Flat. I am reminded of the MAGA hat: no illustration or logo, just a literal acronym for the political phrase. When a symbol merely denotes its target, like a fire exit sign or a no smoking pictogram, there is no richness, no mystery, no complexity, and no interest. There is little to discover in such shallow waters. Everything becomes a sign for the toilet.5

The Old Age aesthetic also tends toward the self-aggrandising and self-referential. In 2023 Newsweek quoted from an interview Jordan Peterson gave to Joe Rogan:

“I have one suit with you in the lining too,” Peterson told Rogan, though he decided against wearing it that day.

“It’s a black suit with platinum wires in it which is kinda cool and inside it’s got [...] sharp, harsh black and white images of you and Brett Weinstein and Ben Shapiro and Russell Brand and, you know, an assortment of...,” Peterson said before Rogan finished his sentence, “Oh that whole intellectual dark web thing.”

I cannot think of a better aesthetic contrast than between the loose flowing fabrics of the Woodstock generation and a sharp black suit woven with platinum wires. One betokens openness to the world, a relaxed posture ready for encounter, friendly to experience. The other suggests you find the world frightening, that you need protection, armour against experience.

And, sorry, Ben Shapiro in the lining of your suit? This is not “kinda cool”.

I am not cool. I understand that cool requires a certain distance, a certain insouciance, a certain unbotheredness that I do not display. I am passionate, engaged, sometimes ridiculous. Often ridiculous.

I’m not cool and I’m OK with that because I’m based.

But I know cool well enough to understand that this ain’t it, fam.

I can’t find any images of this finished suit online, but I did find a quick shot at the design for the inner lining and, ummmm, here:

This is not groovy, it is grim. A grid of scary-looking men, rendered like mugshots, hidden in the lining so no ounce of actual character escapes, locked in a cell of platinum wires.

This is the Old Age movement’s preferred aesthetic mode: literal, obvious, severe, threatened, angry, closed, heavy. Consider, for example, the YouTube feed for the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Conference (a Peterson-fronted annual conference for “heterodox thinkers” and assorted right wing personalities). This grid shows the most recent speeches from this year’s ARC conference, and a couple from last year - I didn’t select these, I just clipped the most up to date feed at time of writing:

What do we see?

• Severe, even angry-looking people - not one real smile among them.

• Black backgrounds, WHITE SERIF TEXT IN ALL CAPS, with swishes of gold. The swishes of gold are…fine? But in the context, amid all that black, it reads more like hazard yellow than shining gold.

• A hint of classicism, with the oddly-bifurcated column (if we are supposed to be “reconstructing”, though, slicing the column in two seems unwise).

• A preponderance of dark suits, and one dark blouse (leavened by the blue of an astronaut’s uniform, thank goodness).

• Man, woman, man, man, man, man, man, man, man.

The text is even worse. It is almost all the language of civilisational threat, loss, and destruction:

• A WORLD SPLIT APART

• “WE HAVE LIVED BY LIES”

• “THEY CAN’T PLAY ANYMORE'“

• “WHAT HAVE WE DONE TO OUR BOYS?”

The contrast with the counterculture of the 60s and 70s couldn’t be clearer. 1965 gave us Man of La Mancha, the musical based on Don Quixote about a man who refuses to live by convention and thus enables others to see new possibilities. 2026 gives us “Konstantin Kisin’s WARNING to 4000 people” in which he sees fewer possibilities than threats.

“Dream the Impossible Dream” becomes “Face the Unpleasant Truth.”

Finally, look at the thumbnail for the interview Peterson did with Weinstein and Heying about their Rally to Rescue the Republic:

Dark jackets. Dark background. Severe expressions. Again the hazard-warning black and yellow. JOIN THE RESISTANCE. And “Woodstock for the Adventurous and Responsible”? Come on! You’re doing my work for me.

When it comes to Old Age aesthetics, it’s less flower power, more dour power.

Freedom Ain’t Free!

I watched that whole Peterson, Weinstein, Heying interview. Shortly after Weinstein declared his desire to create a new Woodstock, an ad breaks in. Not a popup ad, not a YouTube ad, an ad built right into the video. In it, a cheery American voice exclaims “Hey there truth-seekers and freethinkers!”

It continues:

Are you tired of the same old merch that doesn’t quite capture your intellectual spirit? Well, buckle up, because we’ve got some exciting news that will make your synapses fire. Introducing the official Daily Wire merch store…[They’re offering] exclusive Daily Wire gear that’ll make your liberal arts professor do a double take. By shopping [with us]…you’re not just getting awesome merch: you’re supporting free speech and standing up against leftist groupthink. Plus, a portion of every sale goes directly to support the Daily Wire.

This is deeply cynical, “rebellion as merch”: piss off your pomo prof with our Daily Wire branded stickers! It is also absurd, because - look at the language! “A portion of every sale goes directly to support the Daily Wire”, they say. That’s language for a save the whales appeal, not for when you are selling merch branded for a major for-profit media company that gets a kickback from the sale!

The hyper-commercial nature of the Old Age movement reached its apotheosis on the day of the rally itself, though. The Nation reported:

Two hours into the Rescue the Republic rally, Matt Tune, one of the event’s organizers, came on stage with a desperate plea: “I’m here because we need help. We’ve got a few hundred thousand dollars left to make our goal.… You see our QR code?” Tune craned his neck to look at the screen behind him: There was no QR code…“Freedom! Ain’t free!” Tune yelled, before walking off stage.

Tune’s speech, and its staging, includes in miniature everything I have been saying about Old Age: rescue-mission rhetoric, hazard-sign aesthetics, alt-right payment infrastructure, civilisational sacrifice as fundraising pitch, anti-science wellness politics, and the theatrical production of threat.

He begins by declaring he’s on a “rescue mission” - to save…society, I guess? He’s wearing the hazard yellow and black we’ve seen before (echoed in the image behind him). He asks the crowd to donate through GiveSendGo, a Christian crowdfunding website notorious for hosting right-wing extremists. He mobilises the language of civilisational sacrifice to raise money for his concert. He stands beside a podium bearing the MAHA logo, representing RFK Jr.’s anti-scientific, wellness-oriented movement: Goop X MAGA. And he stands behind a bulletproof enclosure, a stage feature that gives the atmosphere of embattled truth-tellers facing a hostile world - symbolism complicated by the fact that many speakers, including Peterson and Brand, stood centre-stage outside it.6

The immediate comparison is obvious. At Woodstock, the legendary announcement was an act of community-care: a warning about bad acid; at Woodstock for the Responsible, it was an act of commercial opportunism: a request for more money.

New Age was Authentic, Old Age is Fake

So, here it is. Here is the deepest objection I have to this whole emerging Old Age movement:

It is fake.

Not fake in the sense that everyone involved is a grifter or a charlatan. Not fake in the sense that no one can possibly get anything real out of it. But fake in the sense of pervasively inauthentic, systematically untrue to its own stated ideals, and riven with performative contradiction.

I have spoken throughout as if Old Age is a counterculture. This is because it positions itself that way: its spokesmen (they are overwhelmingly men) revel in how persecuted they are, how benighted, how they have been pushed outside the mainstream. They are “heterodox thinkers”, they are “fearless truth tellers”, they are “the resistance”, they are the coalition of the canceled.

But this is a posture, a pose. Old Age, for all its protestations, is in fact the cultural wing of some of the most powerful people on the planet.

The ARC conference was set up by Jordan Peterson, Sir Paul Marshall, Baroness Philippa Stroud, and Legatum - perhaps the world’s best-known public intellectual; a British hedge fund manager who owns UnHerd, The Spectator, and a big chunk of GB News; a Conservative Party peer in the UK House of Lords who runs multiple think tanks; and a Dubai-based private investment firm that owns the other big chunk of GB News. Participants at the conference include some of the most powerful politicians in the world (Mike Johnson, Speaker of the US House, keynoted the 2025 conference), and corporate attendees include Palantir, BP, and Airbus.

The Daily Wire, which since 2022 has had a multi-year deal with Jordan Peterson to distribute his podcast (and which once ran a shockingly inaccurate hit piece on yours truly!), is another massive media machine. Set up as “a truly for-profit business with an emphasis on distribution and marketing”, it also presents content from pro-capitalist advocacy group PragerU. PragerU has made videos with presenters including Brexit-architect Nigel Farage, conspiracy theorist Candace Owens, and arch-conservative Douglas Murray. It likes to lobby against gun control, immigration and increasing the minimum wage.

This is the institutional infrastructure that undergirds the people sewn into the lining of Jordan Peterson’s suit.

And, of course, the politician most associated with the movement - the one countless people at the Rescue the Republic Rally demonstrated their support for, both speakers and members of the crowd - is currently in the White House. He is hardly a bastion of order against chaos.7 Were the Old Age movement honest, Trump would be a scandal to it - yet the two seem almost totally aligned.

The Old Age movement is thus funded, supported, and led by seriously influential people and organisations, not “outsiders” in any genuine sense.

Which means Old Age is less a counterculture than an counterfeit culture. It is counterculture cosplay. It poses as counter-cultural - it’s fighting the reigning orthodoxies of academic leftism, cultural liberalism, and woke ideology! - but its deepest wish is to buttress and restore existing political, economic, and religious hegemonies. It is, at the level of its leadership at least, a bunch of wealthy, influential, and politically connected people crying “Take back our civilisation!” while the clearest political expression of their philosophy is currently in power and destroying that civilisation.

This was not true of the real Woodstock.

There were huge problems with Woodstock and the counterculture it came to represent. I am not a fan of New Age thinking, nor blind to the movement’s many abuses. But at least Woodstock was honest. The counterculture movements of the 60s and 70s were often ridiculous, naïve, anti-scientific, overly commercialised, and fertile playgrounds for people who took advantage of young seekers. They introduced countless bad and harmful ideas to our culture. But they had a genuinely alive image of the society they wished to bring into being and, however imperfectly, they tried to build it. Woodstock became a cultural phenomenon because, just for a moment, the world they envisaged seemed real. They genuinely tried to do what they claimed they wanted to do:

• They preached non-commercialism, and made the concert free.

• They preached non-violence, and protested the Vietnam War.

• They preached racial integration, and had a wildly diverse range of performers playing in front of a racially integrated crowd.

• They preached religious perennialism, and introduced an American audience to Eastern mysticism.

• They preached anarchism, and the crowd became a collective overnight, sharing food and water, helping each other through.

• They preached free love, and they practiced it. Extensively.

Woodstock, for all its flaws, was the real thing.

“Woodstock for the Responsible” was not.

That makes all the difference.

The Age of Aquinas

And so, the characterisation of Old Age is complete, from Woodstock to “Woodstock for the Responsible”, New Age to Old Age, Age of Aquarius to Age of Aquinas:

• Anti-corporate > pre-monetised

• Skepticism of mainstream medicine > full-blown anti-vax propaganda

• Hendrix performs explosive rendition of Star Spangled Banner to protest Vietnam > Zuby performs rap about being banned from Twitter for misgendering an activist

• Country Joe McDonald’s uproarious F Cheer > Jimmy Dore saying “Fuck the media.”

• Group yoga, meditation, and focused breathing > Russell Brand leading a manic prayer

• Spontaneous sharing community > highly-managed corporate event

• Jefferson Airplane’s revolutionary set > a sneak peek of Plandemic: the Musical

• Anti-imperial war > hostility to resisting Russian imperial war

• Racially-integrated space > racially aggrieved speakers

• Tie dye and paisley > dark suits and hazard yellow

• Spiritual woo > neuroscientific woo

• Free concert > freedom ain’t free

• Free love > Nofap (God help us)

• Avoid the brown acid > Please donate to our alt-tech crowdfunding platform

• 3 days of peace and music > 1 day of grievance culture

• Nearly half a million people > Maybe a few thousand people

• Ravi Shankar > Skillet

Real Hunger, Rotten Food

I am an ancient Millennial, one of the Forerunners. I grew up just as the internet was beginning to reshape our lives. But I remember the Before Times, too, when we had to, like, go outside. So perhaps my response to the Old Age movement is partly generational. Or maybe it’s because I’m the son of parents themselves touched by the counterculture:

That wizard made me gay.

But I must admit, whatever the reason, I find Old Age culture instinctively repulsive: I find the ideas unconvincing, the aesthetics offputting, the politics vile.

Yet, like New Age before it, it is fantastically popular. I cannot deny the subscriber numbers to these podcasts, the view counts on these YouTube channels, the thousands packing out stadiums to hear Jordan Peterson talk.

Old Age is responding to a real hunger.

What is it?

As I’ve researched this article I have watched hundreds of hours of Old Age content. This includes hours and hours of people talking about why they are into it - why they listen to Jordan Peterson, why they went to the ARC conference, why they attended the RtR Rally.

Much is a litany of grievance.

They speak of loneliness. They speak of disappointment. Lack of opportunity. Lack of jobs. They speak of anger at systems and politicians that have let them down. Fury at vaccine and mask mandates. They express fear of the future, of change, of “gender ideology”, of immigrants. They spin wild conspiracies about the UN, the FDA, the “medical establishment”, George Soros.

The Old Age movement feeds on grievance, and the movement always needs a fresh supply. So it has to keep stoking grievance. Everything is broken, everything is lost, everything’s a threat. If they ever solved any problems, the fuel for the movement would cease to flow. So they serve an endless diet of emergency.

But not all of it is grievance. Old Age devotees also harbour nobler desires. They yearn for something better, a life more beautiful, adventurous, and true. They have a need for meaning, purpose, and a sense of control over their own lives. They seek intellectual stimulation and growth. They want to undergo a quest and serve an ideal.

These are appetites worth feeding.

So, I say to the acolytes of the Old Age:

I know you are hungry. I know you are hungry for meaning, for a sense of purpose, for power over your own life, for some control over the events that shape the world. I know you want adventure, excitement, and inspiration. You want to learn and grow, become more than you are. You want respect. You want dignity. Your hunger for these things is justified. Your search is honourable. Your desires are legitimate.

But Old Age food is rotten. It will not give the nourishment you seek. It will trap you in an endless cycle of fear and threat from which there is no escape, a dark room filled with dark suits, yellow warning signs, and grievance.

Let the Sunshine In!

What is the antidote? Let’s return to the 60s, and to The 5th Dimension’s Age of Aquarius. That wasn’t just a single song, but a medley of two, and the second part is as important as the first. For immediately after declaring the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, the singers cry, emphatically and repeatedly:

Let the sunshine in!

Old Age has no sunshine, and no appreciation for it. They do not seem to understand that in order to respond effectively to grievance, you must offer people agency and hope. The antidote to chaos is not rigid order, but shared purpose. The antidote to isolated fear is not more isolated fear, but collective joy. The antidote to a world that seems to be losing its center is not to endlessly depict our world as dangerous and threatening, but to give people the communal courage to participate despite its danger. Shared purpose, collective joy, communal courage.

Let the sunshine in!

The gurus of the Old Age wanted to build “Woodstock for the Responsible”, but they didn’t understand that Woodstock cannot be made responsible. Woodstock was Woodstock because it was anarchic, free, and loving. It was what it was because it gathered seekers, people searching after truth and meaning. That search was often carelessly and even dangerously conducted, but it was a genuine search, and people were transformed through the quest. They walked the path together, open to the world and finding pleasure in it, vulnerable and free. Something of that spirit is necessary to forge a new path forward, instead of always reaching back.

Let the sunshine in!

You can keep what good you found in Old Age thinking. There is nothing wrong with discipline, per se. Order in life is essential. Clean your room. Shoulders back. Ok, ok. But do not let the siren song of the Old Age place you in a permanent state of fear. No great culture - no great civilisation - was built from fear and doubt. The great creative endeavour of forging a better path forward requires a clear-eyed appreciation of our problems, yes - and they are many. But we also need looseness, connection, joy, openness, vulnerability, courage, freedom, and love. For all its many failures, New Age knew that. Old Age does not.

And when you’re lonely - let the sunshine in!
When you feel like you’ve been mistreated - let the sunshine in!
Let the sunshine in!

I was practically skipping down the street.

I glanced across the street as I passed a busy bar, attracted by the noise of human activity spilling onto the street, and caught the eye of a particularly cute guy, standing with two friends. I smiled, and he looked back. He opened his mouth - did I sense the touch of a smile there too? - and called out

“WHY DO YOU FUCKING FAGGOTS ALWAYS WALK SO FUNNY?”

I stopped dead, skidding a little on the snow, and stared across the road. Provincetown is supposed to be safe, one of the few places where we outnumber them. His friends snickered drunkenly, swaying slightly in the cold, and I briefly considered crossing and trying to start a discussion.

Maybe I could show them that they’re wrong.

But then the cute one said, loud enough for me to hear:

“I wish I hadn’t left my rifle at home!”

With cool authenticity, he mimed taking a gun from a sling round his shoulder, and pretended to shoot me with it, relishing the sound effects and the imagined recoil from his weapon.

I put my head down, thrust my hands deep into my pockets, and walked fast to my hostel, my elation dissipating into the cold night air, joy extinguished by a freezing splash of hate.

***

Why does this happen? Why, even in Provincetown, where sexual and gender minorities are often in the majority for once, did I get a death threat walking down the street at Christmastime? There are doubtless many answers: prejudice is a fungus that grows in countless dark spaces in the human soul. But a primary culprit is an attitude I call “contempt”.

Contempt is premature closure of attention leading to unjust negative evaluation. The contemptuous first adopt a closed stance that shuts down inquiry too early, preventing them from appreciating a something in its fullness. Then, based on their incomplete assessment, they judge their target harshly, considering it unworthy of respect or further attention. This process is often aided by misdescription: someone describes an experience, artwork, or group of people in an inaccurately deflationary way, then takes their misdescription as justification to dismiss what they have misdescribed.

Contempt operates in epistemic, ethical, and aesthetic domains.

In the epistemic domain, contempt rears its head when thinkers prematurely declare an attempt to understand something to have failed, in order to justify a shift to their preferred hypothesis, or when they misdescribe something egregiously and t hen base a theory on that misdescription.

In aesthetics, contempt is the posture that declares whole swathes of aesthetic endeavour “ugly” or “not art”. It is the posture that simplistically decries pop culture as shallow and vapid (without bothering to learn anything about it), disdains rap as “not music”, and sneers at works beloved by millions as “kitsch”.

It is in the ethical realm where contempt shows its ugliest face, though, for here it flattens not the world, not modes of aesthetic expression, but people. Ethical contempt reduces people to groups treated monolithically, often as a pretext to justify discriminatory treatment. Ethical contempt underlies such phrases as “Jews cannot be trusted”, “Muslims are a threat to Western civilisation” and, yes, “Why do you faggots always walk so funny?”.

Avoiding contempt does not mean refusing to make judgments - some things are still true or false, beautiful or ugly, right or wrong. Critique, when open and informed, is not contempt. But we must be attentive to experience, skeptical about our own judgments, and open to being wrong.

An example. Yesterday, I read this article by Professor Carl R. Trueman in First Things. It’s dripping in contempt. He begins with a wild, broad-brush dismissal of the progressive Christian church, which he calls “a poor imitation of what the world considered cool the day before yesterday.” As evidence, he provides the following vignette:

“Walking through the streets of London in early June, I encountered a first-class example of such third-class theological life, courtesy of Pride Month, Anglican style…Wandering back to my hotel…I was struck by a church noticeboard advertising not merely a month of Pride-affirming liturgics but a whole year’s worth. A Q&A with “the next generation of queer priests” in March (tickets available for a mere £5); a queer movie night in April; an evening of LGBTQ questions for clergy in May, followed by a screening of the film Pride…and in December, a queer Christmas Carol Service”… A month is clearly not enough for this parish as it hijacks the rainbow from God’s promise to Noah and attaches it to human confusion for a whole year.

This is a dramatic but tragic example of what happens when Christianity loses sight of its transcendent purpose. It is one of the ironies of progressive theology that however sophisticated its intellectual articulation, its liturgical expression tends toward childishness…What was striking about the noticeboard was that neither God, Christ, nor the cross were mentioned. ”

I can well imagine that, for someone committed to conservative sexual ethics, to be confronted by a year’s worth of Pride programming might feel destabilizing. But this does not excuse the incurious and dismissive attitude that informs his response. The contempt is overwhelming. The events are listed as if their very titles deserve dismissal, without any indication that he attended any of them. He declares them examples of a “third-rate theological life”, symptoms of a loss of “transcendent purpose”, forms of “childish” liturgical expression - but without looking beyond the ink on a poster, how can he possibly know?

Perhaps the queer priests offered profound theological insights. Perhaps the queer carol service was transcendent. Perhaps the Pride service had rich, complex, liturgical content. Trueman does not know, and does not care to know. He saw a poster, made a judgment, and closed the book, closed his mind. Quick, easy, and deadening.

Contempt can be useful this one way: it is an epistemic short-circuit, providing judgments without thought, evaluations without attention, hierarchies without support.

Helpful if your column’s on a deadline.

And, for the record, while it is sneeringly implied that £5 is too much to pay to hear a panel of queer priests share their wisdom, in London this is close to a nominal fee - and hardship tickets were available for nothing, something he could easily have verified had he bothered.

But of course he did not bother. Contempt had delivered its judgment.

Trueman’s response, and the article it birthed, shows contempt risks becoming recursive: something is declared beneath notice, and this delivers one from the responsibility of noticing it. Because you’ve decided there’s nothing to see, you do not look. Because you do not look, you see nothing. Because you see nothing, you feel your prejudice is vindicated. You take the photo in black and white, then revel in pointing out it has no colour.

And this reveals contempt’s last danger, a self-harming sting in the tail: while contempt seeks to diminish its object, it makes its subject smaller. When you display epistemic contempt, you stop looking for what you might not know, stop considering you might be wrong. When you affect aesthetic contempt, whole realms of beauty become closed to you as you refuse to listen to “that music” or play “those video games”. And ethically, well – you stop seeing people as people, refusing the complexity of their existence and the claim their personhood makes on you.

When you look down on something before you have experienced it, you are diminished, not your target. You may think you are establishing a hierarchy with you on top of it, but in fact you are constructing a cage with you inside it. You narrow the aperture through which you appreciate the world, restricting what you can see and feel – who you can see, and whose feelings matter to you. This is how Prof. Trueman can see a year of programmes for people historically harmed and marginalised by the church and see not them - not the people in need of those programmes - but an illustration of his own theological concerns.

I do not want to treat Professor Trueman with contempt. Contempt is contagious - that is one of its most insidious features. We experience someone flattening us, and it is tempting to flatten them in return. But that leads to all of us living in flattened worlds, and I refuse to live like that. I am sure he is sincere in his convictions, and genuinely believes something has gone wrong in the culture of the church. He is entitled to that view and to express it. My objection is not that he wrote about his reaction, or even that he had it: it is that he drew such dramatic conclusions from so little evidence, and in the process missed the people most affected by his judgment.

I recognise, too, that avoiding contempt is difficult in our current culture – especially online. When “takedowns” and “owns” drive viewership, and when the spiciest reaction wins the favour of the algorithm, it is all too easy to offer a hot take instead of a warm one. It is challenging, in the world of TikTok, the YouTube short, the Instagram reel, the X post - these increasingly short forms in which we are encouraged to express ourselves - to be sufficiently receptive to the things we are describing. A hunger for engagement can incentivize contempt by shortening the acceptable window between provocation and response, while squashing our responses to fit a word limit or a time limit. But what if our topic cannot be done justice in 280 characters or 30 seconds? What if we need more space, more time, to truthfully describe what we have seen? Contempt is so very hard to avoid.

But we must try. We must try. Contempt is epistemically unwise because it narrows the mind, aesthetically deadening because it dulls the senses, and ethically dangerous because it flattens people. So we must resist.

The antidote to contempt is receptivity. Openness. Even love. A willingness to look before judging, to resist premature closure. We may still judge – of course, I am judging now – but we should judge only after carefully assessing what is actually there. In response to contempt, which says, hastily, “I’ve seen enough, and what I’ve seen is trash”, I want to say “Listen again. Listen harder. Experience is still singing.”

***

Today, I was in London to attend a meeting. I rarely feel less alive than when I’m attending meetings, but meeting with trustees of The Hibbert Trust to select recipients for our grants gives me a special buzz. This morning I was especially chipper – I’d just alighted from the train at Victoria and decided, despite the heat, to walk through the city of my birth. The hot summer’s air filled my lungs as I bounced briskly through the streets of town. I reveled in the sounds of the city, warmed by the sight of tourists streaming past the Ritz hotel.

I was practically skipping down the street.

I glanced to my right as I passed a city church, attracted by the noise of human activity spilling onto the street, and caught the eye of a preacher on a poster. I smiled, and she looked back. She opened her mouth – did I sense a touch of a smile there too? – and the poster called out:

“PRIDE SERVICES – SATURDAY 4 JULY, SUNDAY 5 JULY”

I stopped dead, skidding a little on the street, and stared at the church noticeboard. It was advertising not merely a month of Pride-affirming liturgics but a whole year’s worth. A Q&A with “the next generation of queer priests” in March (tickets available for only £5!); a queer movie night in April; an evening of LGBTQ questions for clergy in May, followed by a screening of the film Pride…and in December, a queer Christmas Carol Service. A month is clearly not enough for this parish as it honours the symbol of the rainbow, God’s promise to Noah, and affirms human dignity for a whole year.

This was the church. The very ‘contemptible’ church Professor Carl R. Trueman had passed on his recent walk. I had read his article just the day before, had wondered what church it was about, wondered if the description he gave rang true – and now, in a moment of stunning serendipity, here it was in front of me.

I am not a Christian. This is not my place – not theologically, at least. But I had just spent a train ride writing about contempt, and I’ll be damned if I won’t practice what I preach.

Contempt stopped at the railing; I stepped over the threshold.

I walked through the bustling churchyard, filled with charities supporting the rights of animals, serving free vegan food and education both, dodging giggling children and dogs on leashes to get to the door. I entered an antechamber, cooler than outside, ringed with gorgeous paintings: hummingbirds in flight, human bodies in dance.

And then I stepped inside.

I found an oasis in the city. I found pews and hymn sheets. Pipe organ, stained glass. Old stone arches, wooden galleries. Worshippers lighting candles. Calm and quiet, altar and icon, Christ and cross. Yes, Christ and cross. He was present, if not on the poster. In the icon. On the altar. Shown in glass. Sitting in silence. The light of the candles. The comfort of tourists. The hope of worshippers.

Why do fucking faggots walk so funny?

Perhaps our feet are pierced by your contempt.

But this church had said “Be welcome. Be proud. Be here. Be healed.”

I raised my head up, removed my hands from my pockets, and walked slowly to my meeting, my elation sparkling into the hot midday air, joy ignited by a warming touch of love.

“But do you believe in God?”, they probed. I told them no. From then on, it was all systems go - they wanted to share their Christian testimony, give their arguments and, most of all, invite me to pray. After all, if I truly don’t believe in God (they reasoned), then what do I have to lose in praying? Surely, if God doesn’t exist, nothing will happen and I will feel more secure in my beliefs. If something does happen, well, that’s a chance to update my beliefs towards something more true.

As a chaplain, this is occupational opportunity and hazard both. It is not uncommon that I find myself the evangelistic target of enthusiastic students. And, speaking with some other chaplain colleagues today, it seems like I’m not alone: Muslim chaplains occasionally encounter proselytising Christians, Jewish chaplains Muslims. Sometimes, students of the same faith even seek to encourage their Chaplains to “better embody” the very faith they represent!

As long as the proselytisation is respectful, this is fine. Part of the role of a chaplain - especially in higher education - is to publicly represent a tradition, so students can see what life lived according to that tradition looks like in practice. And, sometimes, part of the role is to answer students’ questions about your tradition, and to be a resonant sounding board as they “try out” their tradition on you. One of the reasons I believe chaplains should always be deeply formed and secure in our traditions is precisely so we can respond in an unthreatened and generous way when our students challenge us - including challenge us to change our views. We can perform a real service that way, becoming practice sites for their emerging theology and philosophy.

But something about the encounter made me wonder. As the only Humanist to lead a university chaplaincy in the UK (and one of very few to do so in the world), I sometimes feel students consider me especially ripe for conversion. Were I a rabbi, an imam, or a Buddhist priest, I think students would instinctively understand I would represent a tradition with its own worldview and practices. But when they hear “Humanist” and “nonreligious”, I sometimes sense students hear something more like “nothing”, “no beliefs”. I am perceived an empty vessel to be filled with their ideas, rather than a vessel already filled with different ones. This alters the expected relationship.

Yet, as a Humanist, I do have an active existential life. I have my own traditions and practices which orient me toward reality and deepen my understanding and appreciation of it. I am on an existential path, and I walk that path guided by a comprehensive set of beliefs and values which shape my life as profoundly as any faith. I am not an empty vessel - I am existentially full. When this is misperceived I feel flattened, and that is never pleasant.

Also, there is something about the shift in relationship that feels potentially destabilising. As a chaplain, I want to be a safe harbour for students, someone they can come to for support. This requires me to maintain a posture of openness, kindness, generosity, and warmth - as well as a sort of boundaried authority. When students proselytise chaplains - especially when they ask them to perform vulnerability as an act of spiritual seeking - they risk turning safe harbour into mission field. It can be hard to remain philosophically open to students’ attempts to convert you while maintaining appropriate pastoral boundaries.

Furthermore, the act comes with an interpretive frame pre-set. Imagine I were to pray, and to experience something special. Because of the nature of the invitation, I am almost forced, then, to interpret that experience within a Christian religious framework. But that is counter to my entire existential posture: my view of religion is that religions respond to genuine human needs and give rise to genuine human feelings - ones grounded in natural features of the human organism. I believe we interpret our “religious” experiences through culturally inherited language (because that’s usually all or the best we have), but that this language often misdescribes those experiences, pressing them to fit the frame provided. This being so, I am resistant to a spiritual practice that begins with an interpretive frame - a frame which then necessarily shapes the experience undergone. I want to stay with experience before trying to interpret it overmuch.

The thing that gives me greatest pause, though, is the nature of the invitation. An invitation to pray to God, to really open your heart to Them, is not like an invitation to try a different brand of tea. It is an invitation into an existential posture, an aesthetic stance, even a power relationship. When you are already deeply embedded in an orientation to life, it is not so easy to “try out” another - to do so risks feeling inauthentic, even dishonest. The danger in “trying prayer” is not that I might discover something true, but that I would cease being true to my current way of life.

Existential commitment is not a consumer trial.

To highlight this, I asked my students if they would be willing to attend the worship service of a non-Christian tradition, not as an anthropological or educational exercise, but in a sincere attempt to live into that faith for a while. None of them seemed enthusiastic - which, I felt, rather proved my point. It is easy to ask others to temporarily inhabit a different existential orientation as a “test”; much more difficult to imagine oneself doing it.

Mostly, though, I asked them about their religious experiences. About the student group they are a part of, the difference it has made in their lives, their own beliefs and values. They gave moving, beautiful testimony - I believe their faith has helped them. I want my students to feel held, seen, carried, lifted, loved - if they find that in religion, more power to them.

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked what student society they were a part of, and they told me. It turned out I had recently attended one of their services - I told them that.

They were astonished! “Was it mandatory? Did you have to go for your job?”

I told them no. I just like to visit our religious and belief societies occasionally: to be present, to understand them better, to ensure they know me and know I’m available to them.

“I learned a new worship song, actually,” I said. “I really like it.”

They seemed skeptical: “Really? Which one, then?”

So I began to sing.

They joined the song.

We sang together.

Did it matter, as we sang, that we believed something different? Did it matter, really? Or was the song the worship?

After my students had left, and I was back in my office, I thought more about that song: “Fall Like Rain” by Rachel Halbach. In it, there’s a repeated section addressed to God which begins “May I never lose the wonder of Your presence”. Halbach sings of awe before God and the beauty of God’s friendship.

I, a Humanist, can sing that full-throated. I just lose the capital Y.

I sing it to my students. I sing it to you. I sing it to all my fellow humans on this wonderful, awesome, beautiful world.

What is an “Explanation”?

In an old English manor, in the darkest countryside, someone is found murdered. The room in which they were found was locked, with no other apparent means of entry. The only key? On the body of the deceased. Signs of forced entry, none. The party guests feign innocence. The staff seem to have no motive and no knowledge.

How was the victim killed?

Such a setup like is a staple of British detective fiction. The opening presents a seemingly impossible scenario. An eccentric detective conducts inquiries. Then, in the finale, they gather everyone in the drawing room and unmask the killer.

The reveal takes the form of an explanation. But what is an explanation, exactly? What are the qualities of a good explanation, and how do we separate good ones from bad? Are there necessary properties without which something - while it might be an intriguing theory - is not an “explanation” at all?

The example of the whodunnit helps prime our intuitions about explanations in general. We can all imagine what might be a satisfying explanation the detective might expound - and what might not be. Consider: the detective gathers the guests and staff into the drawing room and , with great confidence and charisma declaims: “The killer was one of you!” If this were all that was said, I submit we would feel cheated - while the statement may be true in the context of the narrative, it gives us insufficient detail to satisfy epistemically. It constrains the field of possibilities, but not enough.

What if, instead, the detective said “Aliens did it!” Likewise, I think we’d feel entitled to more. Here, the “explanation” introduces something more unusual than the phenomenon to be explained, something that requires its own explanation: which aliens, and how do we know they exist? Aliens are not already part of the causal resources we take to be at our disposal, so their introduction confuses more than enlightens.

Even an answer much more typical to the genre - “The butler did it!” - feels insufficient as an explanation, even if they then confess. The detective would have identified the appropriate agent, but many explanatory gaps remain. How did the butler do it? With what? How did they get into and out of the locked room? Why did they do it? Even a true and appropriate hypothesis is not enough, in this context, to feel like an “explanation”.

Rather, we are most satisfied when our whodunnits end with a detailed causal narrative. We want to be able to follow a chain of actions and motivations that lead us from what we observe - the dead body in the locked room - back to the killer (and even, perhaps, back to whatever formed their motive to kill). They entered the room using this secret passage behind the bookcase (a scrap of fabric from their coat was torn away by a brazier in the dark passage); they staged the death to look like an accident (they toppled a marble bust on the victim’s head, but forgot to wipe off their fingerprints); they left the same way, then fabricated an alibi (they claimed to be here at the time of the murder, but other witnesses saw them there); and they did it because the victim wouldn’t acknowledge their parentage (original birth certificates were found). A satisfying reveal in a whodunnit provides a series of well-evidenced steps showing how the murder came about, and why. It creates a network of connected causal theories each (ideally) supported by independent evidence.

We can visualise this. Think of an explanation as like a route across a river. Our goal is to get to the other side. To do this, we do not need a perfectly constructed bridge: we can ford a river on stepping stones as well as on a complete path. But we need enough stones to enable us to jump from one to another comfortably. If the stones are too far apart, we cannot safely make the journey. If there are no stones and no bridge, we cannot cross the river at all.

This metaphor reveals three important things about explanations. First, they are meant to connect things. They connect something proposed as a cause, with something proposed as an effect of that cause: the explanation is the connective tissue that joins those two things together. Second, that explanations have a purpose: they are meant to help you traverse epistemic terrain. Explanations are not ornamental, they are pragmatic. And third, explanations get better the more you can fill in the gaps between the proposed cause and observed effect. An explanation gets increasingly less satisfactory the fewer stones there are to help you cross the river.

A note on agentic explanations

A final point needs a little explication. Sometimes, philosophers will seek to make a sharp distinction between causes that are not agents, like the unfolding of natural processes or laws, and causes that are agents, like people. But the whodunnit example reveals such a distinction is unnecessary. An agent is actually just a peculiar subset of cause in general, and all agents of which we know anything work through affecting physical changes. To incorporate an agent into our explanatory structures, we need to have a sense of how the agent works in the world, and why it wishes to do particular things.

Introducing an agent into an explanatory chain does not relieve us of the responsibility of explaining the mechanisms by which the agent acts. Simply saying “The butler did it!” is not inherently more explanatory than saying “It was an accident!” - unless we already have relevant background knowledge about the butler. Indeed, hypothesising something was the result of action by an agent can impose additional explanatory responsibilities: we need, in order to create a satisfying explanation, to consider what evidence we have to believe the agent in question would likely act in the way we are suggesting they acted. We may need to demonstrate that there are reasons to believe that our psychological model of the agent is actually correct. Agentic causes don’t sit outside or even alongside other non-agentic causes: they are themselves simply part of one single causal explanatory network.

What is “Abductive Reasoning”?

The explanations at the end of whodunnits are admittedly a little odd, in that they run backwards. They are archetypal examples of what are called “abductive” explanations. When we engage in deductive reasoning, we stand at one side of the river and progressively build a route to the other side. We ask “Given the explanatory materials we have at our disposal, what might we discover?”

Abductive reasoning, by contrast, works in the opposite direction. We start at the far side of the river, alongside the effect we wish to explain, and we peer back to see plausible routes by which we might have gotten here. We might see in the water a number of different methods of traversal. Perhaps there is an abandoned raft - maybe that’s how we arrived? Perhaps there is a line of slippery stones. Perhaps there is a half built bridge. These all might, under the right conditions, offer opportunities for us to have crossed.

It is perfectly appropriate to evaluate these methods by which we might have crossed the river based on pragmatic considerations. We can say things like this: “The raft looks pretty stable, and when I test it, it holds my weight. By contrast, the steppingstones are slippery and treacherous, and it seems unlikely we could have made it across that section in the middle where they are so irregularly spaced. And the bridge, well, it would have got us halfway across the river, but then it is unfinished, and I cannot see how we could possibly have got the rest of the way.”

This sort of comparison enables us to choose between different potential routes, and determine which might be the most preferable if multiple options are available. But notice something important: before we can evaluate the quality of these different routes, we must be confident that at least some of them actually are capable of getting us from one side of the river to the other. It is not, for instance, worth comparing multiple unfinished bridges, if it is clear that none of those bridges could actually have brought us safely from bank to bank. We could spend days comparing the grippiness of the tread of each unfinished bridge, tapping at the foundations to see which seems more sturdy, trying to push them to make them sway to determine which one stands up best under adverse conditions. But if all of them end far from the bank on which we stand, and if there is no clear mechanism by which we would make the remaining journey, then none of them are viable as routes to connect what we’ve observed and what we think might be the cause of what we observe.

In such a situation, the responsible maneuver is not to plump for one of those bridges anyway, but to be honest and say we do not yet have, even in theory, anything approaching a complete pathway. We can always say, of any phenomenon, the current state of the evidence does not allow us to propose an explanation. That is an intellectually responsible and honourable thing to do.

Intelligent Design, Panpsychism, and the Missing Middle

Why this focus on the nature of explanation? Because it is my belief that two currently-popular approaches to major questions both have the same epistemic flaw: they propose unfinished bridges as “explanations” for a given phenomenon, then justify adopting their “explanation” by comparing them to other unfinished bridges.

The approaches in question are Intelligent Design and panpsychism. On the face of it, they may not seem very similar: one is (widely understood to be) a pseudoscientific approach to the origin of life, the universe, and everything. The other is a respectable metaphysical view within philosophy. But both, I submit, make the same basic epistemic error: they mistake half-bridges for whole ones, and overlook primary epistemic inadequacies while hyper-focusing on secondary epistemic qualities.

Take first Intelligent Design, in the form espoused by Stephen Meyer. In this discussion with philosopher Nathan Hawkins Meyer states that theism has

“wide and deep and profound explanatory power across multiple…aspects of our experience…It provides a better explanation of the origin of life in the universe, the fine-tuning, the information bearing properties of biomacromolecules and living cells, the origin of the universe”

But nowhere in the discussion does Meyer offer an explanation, in terms of theism, of any of those phenomena. An “explanation”, as in a whodunnit, would provide a series of intelligible causal steps leading from observed effect back to proposed cause. It would construct a network of causal relations that would enable us to understand how one thing led to another. Meyer’s “explanation”, by contrast, seems disconnected from such concerns. Instead, it takes the form of the famous cartoon: “God exists and can do anything - Then a miracle occurs - Then we get what we observe.” The problem here is not that the hypothesis offered could not in principle be true - it is that the “explanation” is just a black box. The middle is missing.

More worryingly, by proposing an all-powerful immaterial mind as the “explanation” for things like fine-tuning, we might think we have simply replaced one mystery with another, bigger one. We began having to explain fine-tuning, but now we have to explain God! This is like the detective who appeals to hitherto-undiscovered aliens as an “explanation” for the murder: the “answer” simply poses bigger questions. Our epistemic state is unadvanced, and may even have gone backwards.

So, too, with panpsychism, the theory that consciousness is irreducible and exists fundamentally at the foundations of reality. Here, Philip Goff is the leading proponent, and in this discussion with Robert Lawrence Kuhn he unwittingly demonstrates both the explanatory inadequacy of panpsychism and why a focus on secondary epistemic qualities is unwise.

First, he says explicitly that “all of these philosophical options - physicalism, panpsychism, dualism (at least in certain forms) are empirically equivalent”. If two frameworks are permanently empirically and inquiry-equivalent, then the differences between them are not explanatory differences in the sense I describe. Because the value of an explanation lies in its ability to causally connect different phenomena, it is inherently (at least in principle) open to empirical test - we can say how changing one thing would change what we observe, because we have a network of relationships relating one to the other. Goff’s approach turns metaphysical options into overlays divorced from explanatory relation, making them useless.

In the face of this problem, he offers two options: agnosticism (saying “We don’t know yet which metaphysical framework best explains this observation”), or attention to secondary epistemic features. But, as I have argued, secondary epistemic features are close to unimportant until the primary purpose of explanation is achieved. Get us across the river!

No worries, says Goff: in fact, panpsychism does explain something better than physicalism. While physicalism cannot show how consciousness emerges from matter, we can show how matter emerges from consciousness. It’s worth quoting Goff at length here, because it reveals the problem in the argument:

“In terms of the panpsychist project of trying to account for the emergence of physical reality in terms of consciousness, I think actually we’ve worked out how to do that. In a sense, the mysteries are solved.

And here we draw inspiration from very important work of Bertrand Russell in the 1920s. Russell’s great insight here was that physics is just mathematical structure. And so in a sense, physics doesn’t care what’s at the bottom of reality. All physics cares about is that it has the right mathematical structure. Whatever’s down there in the base of reality, as long as it has the right mathematical structure, you’re going to get physics out of that.

As Stephen Hawking said, physics doesn’t tell us what breathes fire into the equations.

So contemporary Bertrand Russell-inspired panpsychists draw inspiration from this and they theorise that at the fundamental level we have very simple conscious entities interacting in simple predictable ways and through their interactions they realize certain patterns, certain mathematical structures, and then the claim is those mathematical structures just are what we call physics.

It’s consciousness that breathes fire into the equations. And so in this way we get physics out of some more fundamental story about consciousness.”

Where is the “explanation” here? Panpsychists “theorise that at the fundamental level we have very simple conscious entities interacting in simple predictable ways and through their interactions they realise certain patterns, certain mathematical structures, and then the claim is those mathematical structures just are what we call physics.”

But how? How do they interact? How, through their interactions, do they “realise” what “patterns”? Again, the middle is missing - and without that, we don’t have a bridge. It’s rather like saying, when asked how we arrived at this side of the river “I can explain it: we were once over there, and now we are here! The mysteries are all solved!” That is a hypothesis that fits the data. It would, if true, make the data less surprising. It does not explain the data. With panpsychism, the mysteries of consciousness are not “solved” - they have just been relabeled.

Nonsplanations and the Missing Middle

The common epistemic deficit of both Intelligent Design and panpsychism is a missing middle: effects are not sufficiently connected to proposed causes through intelligible causal steps, despite the theories having some epistemic qualities. I call such theories – theories that have certain properties of explanations, but never connect the thing to be explained to its proposed cause – nonsplanations. They have some of the epistemic features of explanations, and can be described in such a way that they almost feel like explanations. Much is made of their secondary epistemic features, like their simplicity, or parsimony. But that process is like a magic trick, because it serves to obscure, at least some degree, their primary epistemic inadequacy: they don’t get us across the damn river!

The interrogation of secondary epistemic qualities of nonsplanations is not precisely pointless: we can learn something from asking “Which of these nonsplanations is simplest or most elegant?” We can learn, for instance, about what it means for a theory to be simple or elegant. But this approach is epistemically unwise, because it mistakes the epistemic task, and focuses our attention on the wrong thing. For, while we are admiring the beautiful buttresses of one entirely unfinished bridge, we are not seeking that path of smooth flat stones that may be hidden just around the river’s bend. There are costs to epistemic inattention.

It is not entirely clear that it even makes sense to focus on secondary epistemic properties before primary ones are established, because until we know what sort of explanation we need, we do not know which secondary qualities are most important. It is not always the case that the simplest or most elegant explanation is best, and the only way to tell is to view the complete explanation in epistemic context. Sometimes, we want a weighty brick bridge, other times a flexible rope bridge - but until we know more about the problem we are seeking to solve, we cannot tell. So the immediate task for ID proponents and panpsychists is the same: stop admiring your half-finished bridge and ford the river entire. Then we can ask whether your bridge is beautiful.

The Nonsplanation Test

How might you know if you are being offered a “nonsplanation”? I have a simple test: ask yourself, of the proposed hypothesis, “If this hypothesis were true, what difference would it make to inquiry?” If the answer is “none” - it doesn’t show you where to look for more evidence, it doesn’t constrain your explanatory options, it doesn’t open up rich new seams of inquiry, it doesn’t do anything - then it is not an explanation in any sense.

It may be that the hypothesis, were it true, would give rise to what we observe, rendering that observation less surprising. Fine. That is not nothing. But it is not an “explanation”, because it does not ford the river of the unknown.

In the atheist community, a war is raging. Long-time atheist content creator Matt Dillahunty recently called out purveyors of nonreligious spirituality, contending that spirituality is “nonsense”, and suggesting that at least some of those offering nonreligious spiritual services are “charlatans” and “gurus”. In response, Brittney Hartley, author of the book No-Nonsense Spirituality, has defended secular approaches to spirituality and the broader field of nonreligious spiritual coaching/direction. In response to that, Dillahunty posted a four hour rejoinder - so the debate is very definitely on.

I work professionally in what is often understood as the intersection between the secular and spiritual or religious worlds. As the lead chaplain of a university (literally my university’s “Lead Faith Advisor”), it is part of my role to advise my institution on matters related to religion, faith, and spirituality. I offer pastoral care to students and staff, and this regularly requires me to engage with what might broadly be termed “spiritual” questions. People come to me struggling with their faith; with questions about other religions; with life challenges that trouble their beliefs; wanting to interrogate my own views.

This is the water in which I swim.

Yet I am an atheist and a Humanist - the first Humanist, in fact, to lead the chaplaincy at any UK university. I am a strong religious skeptic and a naturalist: I think there is no other world but this. And here I find myself in the odd position of agreeing and disagreeing with both Dillahunty and Hartley. Both, I think, make good points; both, too, make some mistakes.

But the biggest problem is that the frame of this whole discussion is wrong: while discussing whether or not to use the term “spirituality”, we fail to focus on the more important question of “What existential technologies do we need to live life well, and where can we find them?” As I see it, nothing is “properly religious”: the existential technologies religions have developed are built on top of fundamentally secular needs, and all of human culture can give us tools to respond to them. Hartley, in her video, says something deeply perceptive:

“Religion didn’t invent awe. It just organized it.

Right. Religion didn’t invent any of the human experiences it responds to. Those are human. Those are ours. Our task is to recognise that, then reframe the conversation.

Here’s how.

“Spirituality” is Vague, but not “Nonsense”

One of Dillahunty’s major concerns with talk of “secular spirituality” is that the term “spirituality” is vague. This is true. It is a baggy, wooly, underdefined term that risks smuggling in tons of metaphysical, supernatural, and pseudoscientific baggage. For this reason it’s a term that should be treated with skepticism and even suspicion.

Yet the word is not “nonsense.” Dillahunty goes to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary for his definition of “nonsense”: “words or language having no meaning or conveying no intelligible ideas.” This is clearly not the case when it comes to “spirituality”. There are meaningful and intelligible ways of understanding that concept - and Hartley offers a number of them in her response video. She argues, essentially, that there is a category of human experience that we can label with the term “spirituality”, for which we have no obviously better alternative:

“When you put all of this together - the meaning, the purpose, the rituals, the exploration of connecting outside of you and also inside of you - when you put all of that together, we don’t have a secular word that means everything under this umbrella.”

This is clearly a “meaningful” use of the term. It is not “nonsense”. If someone stipulates that his is what they mean by “spirituality”, others can understand and appreciate that usage.

Nor is Dillahunty’s preferred term better. Dilahunty suggests we should just use the term “psychology” for the things Hartley picks out. But saying that experiences like “awe” and “transcendence” are “psychological” rather than “spiritual” does not help. All our experiences are “psychological”, but it can still make sense to break experiences into different categories - as long as the categories are useful. We can discuss “spirituality” intelligibly despite its vagueness: it’s a sort of grab-bag term for a set of loosely related components of our psychology that don’t easily fit elsewhere.

Spirituality is a vague and contested term, but it has some meaning and conveys intelligible ideas. By Dillahunty’s own definition, it is not “nonsense”. Here, I’m with Hartley.

“Spirituality” Should be Treated with Caution

That said, I don’t think the idea that “spirituality” is literally nonsense is in fact the core of Dillahunty’s concern. As one listens to his four-hour response to Hartley, it becomes clear that his worry is not so much “this term has no intelligible content” but “this term carries unhelpful and potentially dangerous baggage.” The nonreligious things that could potentially come under the heading “spirituality” would better be described, Dillahunty thinks, using a different word.

On this score, I’m with Dillahunty: there is a lot of baggage associated with the term spirituality. Dillahunty is surely correct that etymology, and both historic and normative usage of the term “spirituality” connect it to non- and anti-scientific ideas. If you reject the existence of spirits and the soul, then you do have to confront the fact that using the term “spiritual” connects you to concepts you don’t think exist.

The concern about normative usage is especially important in societies in which most people still do believe in spirits, the soul, and the supernatural. If it is important to you to convey the sense that what you are doing is not connected to any of that stuff, then it seems unwise to use a term that does connect you to it. Many people will, on hearing the term “spirituality”, instinctively relate it to something nonscientific. That’s a problem worth considering.

It is true, too, that the broader world of “spirituality” includes lots of charlatans, as well as and well-meaning people without much clarity about what they are doing and why. As both Dillahunty and Hartley stress, the field is a “wild west” with poorly-defined practices, unclear professional standards, and too many people looking to make a buck with too few guardrails. Even without bad actors, an emerging and poorly defined field in which people are trying to assist others as they work through major existential challenges is rife with dangers.

Speaking personally, I have myself investigated the possibility of getting trained in philosophical counselling, and I’ve considered offering my services to private clients for a fee. To the extent that anyone can be qualified to be a “secular spiritual director”, I am: I got “ordained” as clergy in a Humanist tradition, I am seminary-trained in pastoral caregiving, I work professionally as a chaplain, I have multiple degrees in education and human development.

Yet I find the field too inchoate and underdeveloped to feel confident offering my services to private clients under those sorts of headings. When I look at the programmes offering to train people in things like spiritual direction or philosophical counselling, I am not filled with confidence. Not only are almost all of them explicitly religious, but it is rarely clear to me what I will be learning, how it will inform my professional practice, and why I should be confident what their teaching actually works. I would caution anyone thinking to put down serious money to train in this space to be very, very cautious.

So, when nonreligious people choose language for our practices and processes that connects them to unscientific and unvetted ideas, there is real risk of misunderstanding and contamination. It’s precisely in circumstances like this that coining new language is valuable - and I think practitioners in this area should give serious consideration to a linguistic shift. I, for my part, talk about “existential”, rather than “spiritual” matters, and find this works quite well.

We Live in a Garden of Existential Abundance

There’s a a problem with this debate as a whole, though: focusing whether or not to use the term “spirituality” obscures the more important question: how we can live fully vibrant lives as nonreligious people, and what practices - from whatever source - might help us do so?

Both Harley and Dillahunty circle this issue repeatedly in their respective videos, but with attention drawn by the definitional question, the more substantive one goes underexplored. Worse, some of the implicit responses give religion too much credit, centering religion too forcefully in a conversation that should be about the entire range of ways human beings have approached awe, wonder, inner insight, and striving for transcendence.

Hartley, for instance, often speaks as if her project is to “take back” from religion areas of human experience it has “colonised” for itself. She says:

“We’re taking sacredness back. We’re taking moral formation back. We’re taking community back. We’re taking contemplation back. We’re taking death practices back. And, we’re taking spirituality back.”

This is a tempting frame - I have used it myself, in the past. But I think the idea that nonreligious people are “taking back” these existential practices is not quite right, because it suggests both that religious approaches to these questions are inherently valuable, and that the secular world doesn’t already have good approaches.

Indeed, Hartley’s project seems animated, in part, by a belief that the secular world is deficient in terms of what we might call its existential technologies, while religion is rich in them. She talks about how secularism “failed” Ayaan Hirsi-Ali because it couldn’t provide her what she was missing from Islam, for example. The clear implication here is that religion has valuable existential tools the secular world lacks.

I want to resist this approach from both angles. I don’t think it’s correct to afford religious existential approaches special value simply because they are religious or have lasted a long time. A practice like confession (one of the ones Hartley says she wants to recast in a secular mold) is not necessarily existentially enlivening simple because it is a longstanding part of a religious tradition. Our existential practices should earn their keep through demonstrated current value, not perceived inherited worth.

Nor do I think it’s right that the secular world lacks powerful existential technologies. It is so common in these discussions for religious people and atheist both to denigrate secular culture, as if it has little to offer. But that’s not true. Secular music is, for many people, a route to awe. Secular therapy acquaints many people to their inner life as or more effectively than any religious practice. For some, sports or cooking or literature are pathways to transcendence. For many, family life and civic engagement are sources of deep meaning. Human culture is abundant with existential technologies - if only we stop looking from a place of presumed scarcity.

It makes sense, perhaps, for people who come from very religious backgrounds, who have gone through a painful process of deconversion, to think that the secular world lacks tools that they need. It sounds like this was the case for Hartley and many of her clients. But we should be careful not to assume the particular needs of American religious deconstructors reveal a deficiency in secular society as a whole. Secular life is abundant with existential resources - they are literally all around us - and we can miss the riches we already enjoy if we assume there is nothing there.

We must realise that the existential needs religion is responding to preceded religion, and needn’t be responded to through a religious framework or anything close to it. Religion was built on top of - and, when successful, responds effectively to - preexisting human needs, desires, hopes, fears, and feelings. But it has never been the only or even the primary set of existential technologies responding to these needs. Human culture has always been a mix of broadly sacred and broadly secular responses to the deep challenges of being human.

Nonreligious people don't have to spend our time raiding the closed vaults of religion, like starving wanderers in a wasteland blasted by the apocalyptic death of God. We are living in a garden of existential abundance - if only we have eyes to see. We just need to attune ourselves to the extraordinary capacity human beings have - and always have had - to create meaning, generate wonder, transcend ourselves, and connect with each other.

Everything we need is at our feet.

That’s where I wish this discussion would go: not a rejection of the quest to get at what is meant by “spiritual”; not an attempt to recreate in secular language religious existential technologies; but a recognition that we are richer in existential resources than we ever knew - if only we know how to look.

Or are they?

In this epic, obscenely long article I am going to review the evidence, examining what the data really says about church attendance and religiosity in the United Kingdom. To that end I have scoured the internet, read reports, scrutinised journal articles, pored over statistical data sets, and devoured blogs. I have tried to find every single piece of evidence cited by proponents of the idea that there is a Christian revival afoot, and I have tried to go back, wherever possible, to original and reputable sources. This is a long post, so I’ve tried to break it down into readable chunks - but I think it represents the most comprehensive attempt yet to get to grips with the the question: is Christ returning to the UK?

A Note on Statistical Evidence

To answer that question we will have to look at a lot of statistics, so it makes sense to start with a note about statistics in general. A lot of the reporting on statistical evidence - in the mainstream press, in specialist publications (like Christian magazines), and in YouTube videos and blog posts - is terrible. It is often written by people with no training in statistical techniques and little ability to evaluate the quality and reliability of different studies. As a result - and as we shall see - this means that the results of statistical surveys are frequently misunderstood and misrepresented.

I have an advantage here: when I was studying for my doctorate at Harvard, because I was doing an interdisciplinary degree, I was required to study many different research methods - including quantitative methods. That means I learned how to conduct statistical research - how to construct surveys, how to analyse data using statistical programmes, how to tease apart different variables and design effective studies. I even worked for a while for a research group which performs quantitative studies. So, while my primary discipline is philosophy, I have enough statistical training and experience to at least understand what the studies about religion in the UK are actually saying, and (I hope) to avoid some of the pitfalls many of those commenting on this issue routinely fall into. This doesn’t guarantee I won’t make mistakes - some of this data is quite complex - but it does mean that you can trust me to look at the data intelligently and honestly.

Sources of Data

So what is the evidence that there is a Christian revival in the UK?

This question is more difficult to answer than you might imagine or hope, because far too often those who claim a revival is underway do not cite the evidence they are using to support that claim. Or, even if they refer to evidence, they don’t give enough detail to find the actual studies they are referring to. This means someone like me often has to follow multiple links back to an original source of data - if there is an original source at all. But do not fear: I have scoured countless articles claiming there is a Christian revival underway in the United Kingdom, and I think there are 6 main strands of evidence:

• There have recently been a number of high profile celebrities either converting to Christianity or flirting with it, like Jordan Peterson, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Louise Perry, and Tom Holland.

• There was apparently a “surge” in adult baptisms into the Catholic Church - especially among young men - in the Easter period of 2025, according to several sources.

• One major strand of evidence is the Quiet Revival report - a report from the Bible Society, a UK charity, which claimed in April 2025 that “Church attendance has risen by 50 per cent over the last six years”.

• Attendance figures from various Christian denominations in the UK apparently show an increase over previous years. For instance, Christian author and broadcaster Justin Brierley claimed in an article in the Spectator in December 2024: “In 2023, the number of people attending Church of England services actually increased by 5 per cent to almost a million regular worshippers. Admittedly, attendance remains lower than pre-Covid figures, but this post-pandemic bounce back is still a noteworthy contrast to the relentless decline of the previous 50 years.”

• There is a purported increase in Gen Z’s interest in religion, spirituality, and god, itself supported by a number of different pieces of evidence.

• In the last few days (as I write, late August 2025) many outlets have reported on recent YouGov polling seeming to show that more young people say they believe in God today than a few years ago.

Those, I think, are the main strands of evidence. In this article I’m going to go through each strand and evaluate the strength and quantity of the evidence, before drawing what I think is the most reasonable conclusion from looking at all the relevant data. Buckle up, data nerds!

Celebrity Conversions

Let’s begin with the easiest one to do away with - the supposed tranche of celebrity conversions to Christianity. Yes, it is true that some prominent figures have converted to Christianity, or are saying things which suggest increased openness to Christianity, in recent years. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the clearest example of a celebrity convert - from New Atheist to Christian convert is a big and dramatic shift - but we might also reference people like Russell Brand as well, who is British even though he now lives in America.

This, of course, cannot be taken as evidence for any broader statistical trend: while these stories are often evocative, they are not a secure basis on which to claim anything is going on in wider society. Many individuals - including famous individuals - will change their religious views in any given year, and highlighting the stories of a few famous converts says nothing about the broader picture. Without a more thorough statistical analysis it is impossible to say whether more celebrities are converting to Christianity now than is usual. It is certainly possible that a rash of celebrity converts represents a broader trend - but it is also possible that a handful of individual stories are being hyped up, while no broader trend exists. So let’s put this piece of evidence aside, since it doesn’t tell us anything about the state of Christianity in the UK as a whole.

A Note on the Impact of Covid

The rest of the evidence is potentially more significant. Before we dive into it, though, I need to make a big overall point: all research into social trends that involve people going out and doing things has been complicated massively by the impacts of Covid. Covid caused a dramatic rupture in all of our social lives, and the world is still recovering. Many social activities are still less popular than they were before the pandemic, and we must take that into account when analyzing trends.

Consider cinema attendance: Cinema admissions dropped dramatically in 2020 due to Covid (from 176 to 44 million, according to the UK Cinema Association), and have not recovered to pre-pandemic levels (in 2024 there were 126.5 million admissions). So cinema admissions today haven’t recovered to pre-pandemic levels - although they are growing year on year. Now, imagine looking at a graph of cinema attendance from 2019. You’d see a high watermark, then a massive drop, then gains year on year until today, with attendance today still not where it was in 2019. We can imagine someone, after looking at such a graph, saying “Wow! Cinema attendance is up massively since 2020! That suggests a real revival of cinemagoing in this country!” We can immediately see the problem with that statement: it’s at best incomplete, and is actually quite misleading. It would be better to give the whole context and say that cinema admissions have recovered somewhat since the pandemic, but still haven’t reached where they were. The most accurate and honest interpretation of the data would be something like “the recovery of cinema admissions continues”, not “there has been a massive surge in cinemagoing in the last few years.” That’s a big difference in emphasis.

This consideration will become important when we review some of the evidence offered to suggest that a Christian “revival” is occurring in the United Kingdom, because too often commentators use growth post-Covid - but not beyond pre-Covid levels - as the sign of a “revival”, when really it is more like a partial recovery. Some even claim that the impact of Covid should be over now, and so increases in church attendance today reflect genuinely increased interest in the church in the culture at large. But the example of cinema attendance shows this is an incorrect assumption - the effects of Covid continue, and we have to take them into account. That’s why we get articles like this one, which appeared on the BBC in February 2025:

These sorts of articles accurately describe the situation: many social activities are still recovering from the pandemic, so we should really compare data with pre-pandemic levels - or at least keep those levels in mind. Consider this as we look at the evidence offered in favour of the idea that a Christian revival is happening in the UK.

Surge in Catholic Baptisms and Mass Attendance

The first tranche of evidence with potential statistical import is the claim that there has been a recent surge in Catholic baptisms. This has been reported in a number of different outlets, including The Catholic Herald, the Catholic News Agency, and the Daily Telegraph.

I’ve reviewed every article I can find about this supposed surge. None of them offer a link or citation to concrete data on which the claim is based, or say where they are getting the figures from - Catholic News Agency does not, nor does the Daily Telegraph article that piece links to. Instead, they seem to be reporting figures from a few English dioceses - although they are not clear which ones, and what data they got from each.

Let’s go through the Catholic News Agency Article in depth, since it offers the most actual data, to see how they come to make their claim and the sort of data they use to support it. The article begins:

“This Easter Vigil, the Catholic Church in England is expecting a decade-high surge of new entrants to the faith. There is anecdotal evidence of a particular increase in young men, who say their interest was sparked initially by Catholic apologists on social media and also by the traditional heritage of Catholicism.”

So, the claim is that there is a “decade-high surge of new entrants to the faith”. The anecdotal claim about young men we can put aside, as anecdotal evidence is not helpful when trying to pin down a national trend, so let’s focus on the evidence of a “decades-high surge”. We get the first piece of that evidence in the next paragraph:

“Almost all English dioceses contacted by CNA reported a significant increase in both catechumens and candidates at the Rite of Election at the start of Lent compared with last year. Many had not seen comparable numbers for a decade.”

So, it seems that the Catholic News Agency contacted some English dioceses and asked them to report how many catechumens and candidates they had this year, compared with previous years. The problem is, nowhere in the article do they say how many dioceses they contacted, or how many replied. The phrasing in this paragraph suggests they didn’t contact all 20 dioceses in England, and the article only references Westminster, Southwark, Arundel and Brighton, Northampton, Birmingham, and Liverpool - so we have data from 6 out of the 20 dioceses - surely not enough to identify a national trend. Not a good start.

Worse, in the vast majority of cases the figures given are compared only with figures from recent, post-Covid years. As I’ve already shown, post-Covid recovery should not be considered the same as a surge of new entrants. So when we read that “The Diocese of Arundel and Brighton, on the south coast, said it had an increase from 60 catechumens and just under 90 candidates in 2024 to 105 catechumens and 105 candidates this year”, we need not be overly impressed, because it is likely that the figures were even higher in 2018, before Covid. The figures given for Birmingham and Liverpool are likewise compared only with 2024 figures - so that’s half of the six data points not pointing to a “revival.”

What about the other three - Westminster, Southwark, and Northampton? Westminster we can discount as well, because 2025 figures are compared with those from 2018 - saying the diocese has seen the most converts since 2018 is essentially to say “since the numbers cratered due to Covid”, so it is not especially noteworthy. That leaves Southwark and Northampton only. In Southwark, apparently they had the most adults completing the Rite of Christian Initiation since 2011. That does seem like an impressive feat, but the article notes that the Archdiocese “has a significant evangelization program”, so perhaps it is an outlier due to the specific strengths of that one diocese?

In Northampton, the picture is a little more complicated - here’s what the article says:

“In the Diocese of Northampton, just north of London, there were 38 adult candidates for baptism and 62 for reception. Yearly statistics show that this is a level not seen since 2014, and apart from a surge in the mid-2000s, these levels are historically high.”

The phrasing is a little ambiguous, but it reads as if there had been a dip in candidates etc. since 2014, and that 2014 levels have now been reached again, but levels are not as high as they were in the mid 2000s. Once you pick it apart, this is not especially impressive.

And that’s it. That’s the evidence of a “surge in adults entering the Church” in England. I think you’ll agree that the evidence is quite poor: it sounds like all except two dioceses in England have not yet recovered to pre-Covid levels, although they are getting there, and that two dioceses have done especially well this Easter, with one of them getting back to where they were in 2014. This is not the stuff evangelistic dreams are made on, to say the least.

What is especially important to note here is that none of this data is treated systematically and seriously. There is no attempt to distinguish between post-Covid recovery and genuine growth. There is no proper reporting on the sources of the data, how many dioceses were contacted, how the data was gathered etc. Throughout, anecdotal statements are offered to support the narrative, but the anecdotes are never supported by concrete data. In particular, all the claims that young men specifically are converting are anecdotal. The Catholic Herald’s article with the title “Young men lead the way as adult baptisms in UK surge this Easter” bases the claim about young men entirely on the anecdotal observation of a single Archbishop and a single monk in York Oratory. Indeed, the word “anecdotal” appears three times in the Catholic News Agency’s article - and it’s not a very long article.

None of this evidence is sufficient to support the claim that there is any “surge” in adults entering the Catholic Church in the UK.

Quiet Revival Report

The next source of evidence is the big one - the report everyone has been talking about - The Quiet Revival report from the Bible Society. This report has been very influential - widely reported in newspapers, on the radio and television, and discussed ad nauseam online. But what does it actually say, and how reliable are its findings?

Let’s start with some important background information: the document called “The Quiet Revival” is a report written by Dr. Rhiannon McAleer and Dr. Rob Barward-Symmons, on behalf of the Bible Society, based on two polls conducted by YouGov. So we have three contributing entities here, and it is going to be important to pull them apart, so here is a little about each:

• Drs. McAleer and Barward-Symmons are researchers who work directly for the Bible Society. Dr McAleer is Director of Research and Impact at Bible Society, while Dr Rob Barward-Symmons is the Senior Research and Impact Manager at Bible Society (at least according to his LinkedIn page). They both have legitimate credentials: Dr. McAleer has a PhD in Arab and Islamic Studies from the University of Exeter, which perhaps isn’t the most directly relevant to quantitative research like that which informs the Quiet Revival report, but she has been in research positions for two different charities for more than 10 years now. Dr. Barward-Symmons has a PhD in Sociology of Religion from the University of Kent, so has directly trained to do this sort of research. He’s also been a tutor at Cambridge which, as a Cambridge grad myself, scores him extra points.

• The Bible Society is a charity, a non-profit organisation in the UK which exists to disseminate the Bible throughout the world. In their words: “We believe the Bible is God's gift to the world. We want everyone to discover its message for themselves.” It is therefore an explicitly Christian evangelistic organisation, so we can expect perhaps a built-in bias in favour of a result which shows Christianity in a good light. Note that both Drs. McAleer and Barward-Symmons work directly for the Bible Society - they are not in academic posts at present.

• Finally, YouGov is, in their words, “an international online research data and analytics technology group.” Basically you can hire them to do research for you, and the Bible Society hired them to conduct the two polls which became the basis for the Quiet Revival report. The way they work is that they have a panel of people, which in this case is designed to be representative of the UK population, who are remunerated for participating in surveys - you get points for filling out a survey and can trade those points in for goodies. The Bible Society would have worked with YouGov to design two surveys - one in 2018 and 2024; those surveys would be sent to the panel; the panel responds to the questions online, YouGov will have cleaned it up a bit to ensure its reliability, and there you have your data. YouGov is a very well-respected polling company and I have no reason to doubt that they carried out their work to a high standard.

Those are the three major players you have to know about before understanding what is going on with the Quiet Revival report. But we also have to make one further crucial distinction: between the data itself, and the report that interprets and explains the data. What YouGov will have provided the Bible Society is a bunch of data about people’s responses to the questions they posed. The Bible Society took that data and wrote the Quiet Revival report to explain that data - and there is, often, when any group interprets data, a gap between what the data says and what people interpret it to mean. I think this gap is really quite large in the case of the Quiet Revival report, so I am flagging this distinction up-front because I think this is where a lot of the challenges with the report lie.

So, what does the Quiet Revival Report say? Here’s a quote from the foreword to the report, written by Paul Williams, Chief Executive of the Bible Society, to give you a flavour of its contents and tone:

“the story told in this report is revolutionary in terms of the public assumptions about Christianity in England and Wales, and transformational in terms of how Christians think about themselves.”

“For decades, Church attendance and nominal adherence to Christianity has been declining, and it has been assumed that this decline would continue and was in some sense an inevitable product of modernity. While the decline has certainly been real, we now know that the trend has been reversed. The tide of faith, whose ‘melancholy, long-withdrawing roar’ was described by Matthew Arnold, has now turned”

“Large numbers of young adults, male and female, have started going to church, reading the Bible regularly, practising prayer and worshipping Jesus Christ as God.”

And now a couple of quotes from the “Report in 30 Seconds” page (p. 5), which I must assume was written by Drs. McAleer and Barward-Symmons:

“In churches across society something amazing is happening, challenging long-held predictions about the future of Christianity in the twenty-first century. Where once we saw aging congregations and a steady decline in attendance, we see dramatic growth, led by the young.”

“the Church is in a period of rapid growth, driven by young adults and in particular young men.”

Take a moment to think about the language used here. A “revolutionary” story. “Transformational”. “The tide of faith has turned”. “Large numbers of adults” going to church. “Something amazing is happening”. “Dramatic, rapid growth.” These are really exciting adjectives, and I want you to keep them in mind when we look at what the data actually says - because in my view the data does not support such a bombastic interpretation.

Now I’ve set the stage, let’s go deep. The two major claims made by the Quiet Revival report which are relevant to the question of whether a Christian revival is happening in the UK are these: first, that there has been an increase in the number of people who go to church in the UK since their first survey in 2018, particularly young people and especially young men; second, that there is an increased openness to spirituality and God among the rising generation, also since 2018. Here are some key statistics from the report:

• “In 2018, just 4% of 18–24-year-olds said they attended church at least monthly. Today this has risen to 16%” (p.6)

• “Young men [attending church at least monthly increased] from 4% to 21%, and young women from 3% to 12%.” (p.6)

• “churchgoing Christians now make up 12% of the population, up from 8% in 2018. In numerical terms, that’s growth from 3.7m in 2018 to 5.8m in 2024 – an increase of 56%.” (p.6)

• “35% of 18–24-year olds say there is ‘definitely a God/gods or higher power’” (p.8)

The rest of the report - much of it actually - deals with the benefits for individuals and communities purportedly associated with regular church attendance. Since that is not directly about whether a religious revival is happening in the UK, I’m not going to talk about that bit of the report, except to say that it is well established that there are lots of benefits associated with regular participation in a religious community. Whether those benefits are causally related to congregational participation is disputed, and the effects seem to be more about the benefits of community membership rather than about religious belief.

With that said, let’s look at each of the report’s two most important claims in turn.

Increase in Church Attendance

People regularly overstate their church attendance

First, the claimed increase in people attending church. The first important thing to note when assessing this claim is that the Quiet Revival report is based on self-report data. The researchers did not directly count the number of people going to church - rather, in both 2018 and 2024, they asked people to say how often they went to church.

It is very well-established in the sociology of religion that people overstate how often they go to church when talking to researchers: people say they are going to church more than they actually go to church. This is so well-known an effect that it is referenced directly in academic articles. In one article from 2011 in Public Opinion Quarterly, the abstract begins:

“It is well established that religious service attendance is overreported on conventional surveys.”

While that article comes from the USA, this effect is found in the UK also. Consider this quote from the British Religion in Numbers website, which was a British Academy Research Project, not just some random blog:

“attendance data based on counts can be more valuable than self-reports of attendance via survey data. People often exaggerate or otherwise misremember their actual attendance.”

So, it is widely accepted within the sociology of religion that people often exaggerate how much they attend church when asked in surveys like the one conducted by YouGov on behalf of the Bible Society. So we should assume that the attendance figures are lower than reported - that would be in line with what decades of such studies have shown

Despite this being a well-known effect, I can find nowhere in the report where it is mentioned. Instead, people’s self-reported church attendance is translated directly into actual church attendance, as in this chart from page 16 of the report:

Notice the caption here: “Percentage of age-group population who describe themselves as Christian and go to church at least once a month” (emphasis mine). I think, for maximum honesty and clarity, that caption should say “Percentage of age-group population who describe themselves as Christian and say they go to church at least once a month.” Because we know people tend to overstate their church attendance, the report should make this distinction throughout, and not directly translate a claim about church attendance into a reality about church attendance.

This overstatement effect is very briefly mentioned in a FAQ subsequently published on the Bible Society’s website. The FAQ says “it's possible people overestimate their attendance and what they report to us is more aspirational. Nonetheless, this does not mean they are lying (and they answer the rest of the survey just as active Christians would be expected to do) and any of these effects would have been present in 2018 as well as 2024.” This is, I think, an understatement of the problem: the social scientific consensus is that it should be assumed that people overstate, rather than understate, their actual church attendance in any survey of this type. I think the Bible Society should be honest about that, putting that information in the actual report so readers can be fully informed.

This is especially important because the media commentary on studies like the ones which informed the Quiet Revival report is often poor, so it is critical that readers are given the full information. When the distinction between self-reported attendance and actual attendance is not maintained, further reporting on the data can be affected. For instance, the Catholic Herald article we explored earlier includes this quote about the Quiet Revival report: “The Bible Society found that church attendance in the UK since 2018 had increased by 55 per cent.” Of course, they found no such thing - they found that the attendance people claimed had increased by that amount - and that distinction really matters. The failure to highlight the extent to which people are known to overstate their church attendance is a real problem with the Quiet Revival report, and undermines its conclusions and its credibility.

The rate at which people overstate their church attendance is not static, but changes based on social context

However, the Bible Society is correct to point out, as they do in their FAQ, that they are comparing the results of their 2024 survey with the results from their earlier 2018 survey. And so, they argue, even if people are overstating their church attendance in their 2024 survey, they would have been doing that in 2018 too. What they are interested in is the difference between the two outcomes - and that difference is relevant even though people, in general, overstate their church attendance.

This response is partly true, but incomplete. It is correct to say that people were likely overstating their church attendance in the 2018 survey, and that you can draw inferences from the change in the responses even if people overstate their attendance in both surveys (although I can’t, by the way, find anywhere the Bible Society acknowledged this problem back in 2018). But you have to be careful, because there is no guarantee that people will overstate their church attendance to the same degree in each survey. We know from lots of other studies that people are more likely to overstate their church attendance in some contexts than in others. For instance, in cultures or countries where church attendance is expected, people overstate their attendance more than in cultures where it is not. So, if British culture has become warmer toward church attendance since 2018, or if there are more people in the UK now who come from countries where church attendance is more expected, then the rate of attendance overstatement could plausibly have increased - which would mean that these new statistics are more inaccurate than the 2018 statistics.

We do not know if this is the case because the data the Bible Society presents does not enable us to determine the extent to which people are overstating their church attendance - but given this, they should have done some detailed work to address the problem. Indeed, there is some reason given in the report itself which suggests that the social desirability of Christianity might be changing - and if so, that increases the probability that people will overstate their church attendance in 2024 more than they did in 2018. So the Bible Society cannot simply assume that the rate of attendance overstatement is the same in both surveys and thus look purely at the change in responses - there is more work that needs to be done to be sure that the data is reliable. They did not do this work.

There is other, contradictory evidence

That said, it would be odd if all these people are exaggerating their church attendance, and it is unlikely that all the difference between the 2018 and 2024 results is due to different rates of overstatement. Taken on its own, there does seem to be some evidence in the Quiet Revival surveys of increased church attendance since 2018 - but it should have been presented much more cautiously than it is. Is the report vindicated, then? No, because we shouldn’t take the results of this single survey on their own. There happens to be a lot of other evidence about church attendance in the UK which the Quiet Revival report essentially ignored, but which paints a very different picture.

Here a lot of my work has been done for me by Humanists UK, who released two responses to the report over the past couple of months (props to Humanists UK Director of Public Affairs and Policy Richy Thompson, who did a great job with these articles). The first points out that some Christian denominations themselves publish reports about how many people go to church, and those reports are based on actually counting the number of people who attend. Because the Quiet Revival report breaks down the supposed increase in attendance by denomination, we can calculate what attendance rates should be were their figures accurate, and compare them to the counts the denominations conduct themselves.

Both the Church of England and the Catholic Church publish attendance figures annually, and those records are available online, and they both show that the purported increase in attendance the Quiet Revival report claims is not actually happening. As Humanists UK correctly relates, “The most recent report [from the Church of England] (2023) records this measure of monthly church attendance as going down from 1.1 million [in 2018] to 1 million [in 2023]. It records average weekly attendance as going from 880,000 [in 2018] to 690,000 [in 2023].” The chart below summarises the Church of England’s own attendance counts since 2009 (I note that the figures in the graph don’t quite seem to match the figures in their own published table - I cannot work out why this is. But the graph is roughly correct, and shows the overall trend - long-term decline, a massive dip due to Covid, and a slow recovery not to pre-Covid levels - this chart is on p. 11).

The Catholic Church, for its part, “records weekly mass attendance each year. Between 2019 and 2023, this was reported to go down from 700,000 to 550,000.” Reported by whom? By The Tablet, a Catholic magazine using data from the Bishop’s Conference - so, these figures come from the Catholic Church itself. It is interesting to look at how The Tablet reported these findings, because it shows how misleading coverage of church attendance can be: its headline was “Big increase in Mass attendance recorded in Britain.” But read the text and it becomes clear that the church was affected massively by Covid and has not yet recovered. “The increase”, they write, “still falls short of the pre-Covid numbers.” While The Tablet tries to put a brave face on these figures with its headline, the data shows the same trend as with the Church of England - a slow but incomplete recovery after the shock of Covid, not a dramatic surge of new converts.

In case you think my reading is unfair, and understates the “growth” the church is experiencing, a comparison with parkrun is instructive. Parkrun is a charity which organizes weekly 5k runs. Participation is free, it requires people to go outside, and the runs are mostly held on Saturday mornings - so, like attending church, this is a free weekend morning social activity which was also dramatically impacted by the Covid pandemic. And - bonus! - because each runner has to register and gets a time after they’ve finished, statistics for how many runners participate each week are available online - thanks to elliottline.com for collecting years of parkrun data, enabling us to see just how the pandemic affected participation.

In January 2020, there were 199,410 parkrunners in the UK, a record number for the time. Then, in March 2020 - Covid hits, and there are no runs for months . In July 2021, parkruns pick up again, recording 98,651 participants in the first big one after the UK reopened. Then there’s a steady increase in participation as social activities recover until, in January 2025, the numbers reach pre-pandemic levels. By August 2025, though, there were 211,000 runners - a new record, higher than before Covid. You can see this trend in a graph published in March 2025 by the parkrun statsgeek group on Facebook (yes this group exists, I love people):

This is what it looks like when a social event successfully fights back after Covid and demonstrates genuine growth: it takes a few years to get back to where it was, then exceeds where it was. In this sense, parkrun is truly growing in a way neither the Church of England nor the Catholic Church in the UK are, according to their own figures.

Over roughly the same period, neither the Church of England nor the Catholic Church record anything like the attendance figures we would expect were there really a revival of church attendance going on, and were the Quiet Revival report true. The report is directly contradicted by actual counts of actual people, published by two largest two denominations in England and Wales themselves, which show a slow recovery post-Covid which has not yet reached, let alone exceeded, pre-pandemic levels.

The second Humanists UK response points to further data which undermines the conclusions of the Quiet Revival report. They note that a different YouGov survey, conducted by the British Election Study at around the same time, found that even reported church attendance is declining in the UK. In the 2024 BES study only 6.6% of people said they were both Christians and attend church at least monthly, which was down from 8% in 2015. By contrast, the Quiet Revival report said that 12% of people said they were both Christians and attend church at least monthly - up from 8% in 2018. As Humanists UK and David Voas, Emeritus Professor of Social Science at University College London both aver, the fact that two polls, asking a similar question over a similar time period, should display such different results demonstrates that we cannot rely upon these sorts of methods to determine church attendance accurately.

Worse, there is yet more data that undermines the conclusions of the Quiet Revival report: Prof. Voas points out that the British Social Attitudes survey “shows that the share of adults in England and Wales who said that they were Christian and went to church at least monthly fell by nearly a quarter (from 12.2% to 9.3%) between 2018 and 2023.” He also considers this “the best and most reliable source of data on such matters”.

So here we have no less than four different sources of data that directly contradict the conclusions of the Quiet Revival report: attendance counts from the Anglicans and the Catholics themselves, which do not show a revival; a similar poll by the same polling agency, YouGov, which found that reported church attendance is going down; and a different survey with a more reliable research method which also found that reported church attendance is going down.

To summarise:

Quiet Revival Study:

• 2018: 8% say they are Christian and attend church monthly or more

• 2024: 12% say they are Christian and attend church monthly or more

• Reported attendance up 4 percentage points.

Church of England Count:

• 2019: worshipping community (those who attend church once a month or more) 1,114,000

• 2023: worshipping community 1,007,000

• Counted attendance down 107,000

Catholic Church Count:

• 2019: weekly Sunday Mass attendance 701,902

• 2023: weekly Sunday Mass attendance 503,308

• Counted attendance down 198,594

British Election Study:

• 2015: 8.0% say they are Christian and attend church monthly or more

• 2024: 6.6% say they are Christian and attend church monthly or more

• Reported attendance down 1.4 percentage points.

British Social Attitudes Survey:

• 2018: share of adults in England and Wales who said that they were Christian and went to church at least monthly 12.2%

• 2023: share of adults in England and Wales who said that they were Christian and went to church at least monthly 9.3%

• Reported attendance down 2.9 percentage points.

There is a wealth of evidence, then, from different sources - including formally-published counts from Christian denominations themselves and surveys conducted around the same time, using similar methods, and by the same polling company that conducted the Quiet Revival study, which directly contradicts the Quiet Revival data.

This is why a number of Christian commentators have suggested that the self-reported church attendance found in the Quiet Revival study is unlikely to be accurate. Christian author Christopher Gasson (who we will encounter again later) said in a YouTube video discussing the Quiet Revival’s results that “young people claim to be attending church, but clearly they are not”, while the Church Mouse blog writes “While Mouse would love to believe that people are flocking back to church…it simply didn't fit with the data we have from every other reliable source” (the Church Mouse blog also has a good analysis of the Quiet Revival study and why it might have produced such anomalous results).

In addition - and this is the thing which personally really frustrates me - all of this contrary evidence was available to the authors of the Quiet Revival report. They could have compared their findings with the published counts from the Church of England and the Catholic Church. They could have considered the BES and BSA findings, and thought about why their results didn’t match. They could have written a thorough, responsible, intellectually engaged report on the state of the church in the UK - but they didn’t. The authors of the Quiet Revival Report did not do the basic work of comparing their findings to other publicly available data in the attempt to provide a full and accurate picture. Instead, they ran with their wildly out-of-step findings without considering other data which undermines their preferred narrative. I agree with the Church Mouse blog when they say:

Mouse wonders what the response to these two surveys would have been if they had shown an unexpectedly large decline in church attendance. Presumably, Church commentators would have analysed the methodology, compared the results with other authoritative sources and concluded that it was a rogue poll. What a shame similar rigour has not been applied in this case.

This lack of care really came home to me when the problem of the disparity between other publicly-available data and the Quiet Revival data was put directly to the authors of the Quiet Revival report in an excellent YouTube video from the Religion Media Centre. The exchange goes like this:

Moderator: What is the answer to the question about the visibility [of these people who say they are going to church] and where they’ve gone. Because if the main denominations are not picking this up, what does that say about whether we can trust your report? If your report is saying one thing - that there’s been a very big spike in the number of young people who are joining churches, and the churches are not picking it up, how do you explain that?

Dr. Barward-Symmons: With our methodology this is as high-caliber, as rigorous as you can get. Now, as we say, the churches use a different methodology, and I’d want to speak to someone from the different units who are undertaking their counts to see what they think about this, where they think there might be weaknesses in there, because it’s not easy to do like for like on a very different methodological approach…I’d want to dig into it more because it is a curiosity, but from our methodological stance we’re as confident as we can be.

This is, to put it bluntly, a wholly inadequate response. Yes, different methods are being used in a self-report survey compared with a direct count of participants, but the numbers are so wildly different that surely it must have raised some red flags. Is Dr. Barward-Symmons really saying that he trusts their self-report data - wildly out of step with other, similar self-report data as it is - over the actual counts published by the actual churches these people are supposed to be going to? When those churches clearly have a vested interest in inflating, rather than deflating the numbers? To me, this lack of care undermines the credibility of the report as a whole.

Gen Z Spiritual Renewal

The second major claim of the Quiet Revival report is that, beyond increased church attendance, there is a broader revival of spiritual and religious interest among younger people. Here, I’m going to evaluate the evidence from the Report itself alongside four other pieces of evidence which are all cited in the report’s FAQ as further data supporting their thesis. In this way, I can examine the claimed “spiritual renewal” as a whole.

The Quiet Revival Report

First, the Quiet Revival report itself. It says:

“The young people in our sample don’t just go to church more, they show above-average levels of warmth to spirituality, the Church and spiritual practice. This group of 18–24-year-olds are the most likely to pray regularly, with 40% saying they pray at least monthly. More than half of them (51%) have engaged with a spiritual practice over the past six months, compared to 42% of those older than them. They are also the group most interested in learning more about the Bible, with 37% of 18–24s saying they are curious to discover more about it.

I have no reason to doubt these results and, as we shall see, they do tally with some other evidence suggesting that young people today are increasingly interested in religion and spirituality. What I will point out, however, is how vague and broad these statements are. Young people may say they “pray at least monthly” (which is not actually that much if you think about it), but who are they praying to, and what does it mean to them that they “pray”? Does hoping you get a parking spot at the supermarket count? What exactly counts as a “spiritual practice”? A walk in nature, perhaps? Listening to music? And I imagine that young people are more “curious to discover” many things when compared to older adults - how does their greater interest in the Bible compare with their interest in other things? These are the sorts of questions we should be asking when presented with this sort of data: it is not immediately clear what any of it means - and it certainly doesn’t speak to a specifically Christian revival.

The Christopher Gasson “Devil’s Gospels” poll

Second, in their FAQ the report’s authors point to the fact that “In January of 2025, the Times reported Gen Z are half as likely as their parents to identify as atheist.” An initial point to make is that obviously any change in the spiritual identity of young people doesn’t necessarily translate to a change in behaviour: the article itself says “Their higher level of spirituality does not necessarily mean that members of Gen Z are flocking to fill the pews of churches”.

More directly related to the question of whether Gen Z is undergoing a revival of interest in religion, though, is this: these results come from an independent poll conducted as part of the pre-release publicity campaign for a book by Christian author Christopher Gasson - a book which promotes Christianity. Here’s how the survey is described on the site: “As part of the book launch, a 10,000 respondent survey has been commissioned to map out Belief in Britain in 2025 and how it has changed over time.” (Emphasis mine.) The poll is therefore not an academic piece of research, but part of the publicity campaign for a book.

Furthermore, the report about the poll available on the book’s website (called “Belief in Britain”) gives very little information about the sample, the questions asked, or any of the important pieces of information we would need to determine how reliable its conclusions are. In short, this poll and its results are not presented rigorously. This should give us pause - in my view, until we can get more information about the survey this data is based on we should treat it with extreme caution.

YouGov belief in God tracker

Third, the Quiet Revival FAQ states “YouGov’s belief in God tracker suggests dramatic change in belief patterns among young adults over recent years, where in 2022 belief in God or gods stood at 19% of 18-24 year olds, increasing to 45% in January 2025.” That certainly sounds like a huge change - 19% in 2022, 45% in January 2025! Enormous! The problem is, this is a partial picture. When you look at YouGov’s belief in God tracker for people aged 18-24 - graph below - you will see two particularly interesting features:

• Recorded belief in God (the green line) took a little dip in 2022.

• In January 2025 belief in God jumped before, in August, returning to below where it was August 2024.

To give the Bible Society their due, they did not have the benefit of the August 6th poll results when they wrote their FAQ - it was published (as far as I can tell) in July. Nonetheless, looking at the data as a whole shows you just how much it fluctuates over time: belief in God among 18-24 year-olds goes from 39% in August 2024 to 45% in January 2025 to 37% in August 2025. These are notable differences in a short time (and there are other similarly large fluctuations in the data the Bible Society had access to). Therefore, it is dangerous to select any two points on the graph and point to the difference between them as evidence of a trend - especially if you purposefully compare the lowest point of belief in God in the last four years with the highest point. That feels like cherry picking.

Consider: I could use the same data to say, truthfully, “Since January 2025, there has been a dramatic drop in belief in God among 18-24 year-olds. While in January, 45% said they believed there is a God or Gods, now - only 6 months later, only 37% do - a drop of almost 20%”. This would be accurate if all I’m looking at are those two data points - but what’s important is the whole trend - and a group like the Bible Society should give us the whole picture, instead of just picking two points of data which support their point.

This is especially unfortunate, because it does seem to me that since 2022 there has been a broad increase in the percentage of young people saying they believe in God or Gods - so there might be something there. But by only offering a partial and misleading picture, the Bible Society will find it harder to claim they are dealing with the data fairly. It would be more accurate and honest to say something like “Rates of belief in God among young people, as measured by YouGov, fluctuate significantly between polls. However, there does seem to be a trend by which, since August 2022, more young people say they believe in God or there are Gods.”

Increased Bible sales

Fourth, the Quiet Revival FAQ says “The Times reported on research earlier in the year – before the release of our report – of a significant rise in Bible sales driven by Gen Z in particular.” This is an odd one - the link the Bible Society offers doesn’t lead to the article they reference, but I found it nonetheless (it’s here, and it’s written by excellent Religious Affairs Correspondent for The Times Kaya Burgess. I may be biased by the fact that he wrote a very nice article about me). Turns out these numbers come from SPCK, a publishing company. What does “SPCK” stand for, I hear you ask? Why, the “Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge” which, in its own words, is “the biggest independent Christian publisher in the UK and a UK-based Christian charity.” So perhaps not the most reliable source for information about Bible sales - though let’s see what data they offer.

As for the “research” SPCK conducted, as far as I can tell, SPCK has just accessed Nielsen BookScan data to look at UK Bible sales. Sadly, they don’t offer any way to access the data at all, so I cannot verify their claim or even see exactly what they compared, so it is difficult to draw any conclusions. Given that SPCK might reasonably be viewed as a biased source, they should be transparent and publish the data on which they are basing their reporting - but they don’t.

Furthermore, SPCK claims that “This dramatic rise highlights a renewed interest in Scripture, driven largely by Generation Z—a group once considered distant from traditional religion” - but they don’t cite any evidence at all about Gen Z’s book-buying habits in particular. What we are looking for here are direct, age-stratified data from a reputable source (like Nielsen data broken down by buyer age), to show that Gen Z in particular are buying more Bibles - but SPCK don’t give us any. This part of the argument seems to be an inference based on SPCK’s belief that Gen Z are becoming more spiritual, and not something based on hard data. (Here we see how these narratives feed themselves like the Ouroboros - SPCK reads the Quiet Revival report and comes to believe Gen Z are more spiritual, then they attribute increased Bible sales to Gen Z, then the Quiet Revival people use that as further evidence Gen Z are becoming more spiritual…)

That said, I was able to track down some more reliable and independent evidence suggesting that Bible sales have increased in the UK: this article from The Bookseller from July 2024. The article claims that “Christianity might be on the decline in the UK, but the word of God is selling better than ever”; as a trade publication The Bookseller will have access to BookScan data; and the article predates the SPCK “research”. For these reasons, I’m happy to believe that there is indeed an uptick in Bible sales in recent years - though I don’t see any direct evidence that it is young people who are buying them.

British Election Study, as reported in The Economist

Fifth and finally, the Quiet Revival FAQ points to “a recent article by The Economist [which] highlights both an increase in church attendance since 2019 among younger adults from the highly regarded British Election Study and a massive rise in Google searches for 'The Bible' and 'Christianity' across 13 Western countries since 2020.”

There are lots of interesting things in this Economist article - I read the Economist weekly, I strongly recommend it - but the most salient bit is a chart taken from an analysis of the British Election Study suggesting an uptick in church attendance among young people since 2019. It’s worth noting, first, as we have seen, this same source shows an overall decrease in church attendance in the UK. It is interesting that the Bible Society should use this data here, suggesting they believe it to be reliable, when in aggregate it speaks against their hypothesis that a Christian revival is occurring in the UK.

In any case, I looked at the BES data myself and could not quite replicate The Economist’s findings (this took hours - the BES website is really fiddly and tends to think you are a bot if you do make too many charts, locking you out of the site. The things I do for you!). While I did see that in 2024 13.1% of 18-24 year-olds say they are going to church at least monthly (which looks in line with The Economist’s graph), in 2019 I found that figure to be 10.5%, higher than the 8% or 9% their graph seems to suggest (one of the weaknesses of the Economist is that they provide extremely simplified graphs which really do not help when fine-grained analysis is needed). While 13.1 is greater than 10.5, it is a much smaller increase than the Economist reports, so I’m not sure what is going on there.

More importantly, if I cannot figure out exactly how The Economist came to the figures represented in their graph, it is likely The Bible Society cannot either. Note that they refer to the article, not to the data the study is based on (which is freely available!), so I think it probable that they simply read the article and trusted its findings. I wish research organisations would not do this, and actually went to the raw data or to a proper study whenever possible - if I, a random lunatic willing to spend too much time on an analysis like this, is willing to look up the original data, then paid researchers defending their own report should be able to do the same.

That said, the data The Economist cites does seem to show a modest increase in the percentage of young people who report attending church monthly, along with an increase in popularity of the Google search terms “Christianity” and “The Bible”.

Conclusion: No “Quiet Revival”, but Something Is Changing

What to take from this exhaustive and exhausting analysis of (what I think is) all the evidence cited by those arguing there is a Christian revival in the UK?

Social Science is Hard

First, that we should be careful when we do sociological research: social trends are hard to identify and to measure, and even harder to explain. Social science is difficult, and requires exquisite care and attention to detail - we don’t want to draw conclusions too hastily on the basis of too little evidence. I think it is clear, from looking at the many examples of breathless reporting on the basis of scant or contradictory evidence I have catalogued, that too many Christian media outlets are over-hyping the data, and being insufficiently cautious when deploying it. This poisons our public conversation because it makes it more difficult for the public to understand what is really going on, and doesn’t effectively educate people regarding the evidence we have and the processes we use to help us understand what is going on.

That said, I think it is possible to draw a few conclusions - and here is where I nail my colours to the mast and take a bit of a risk, saying what I think is the best interpretation of this data. I could well be wrong, though, and none of the data necessitates this interpretation - it’s just the best I can do given the data we have.

No Christian “Revival”

I think it is premature to conclude that anything like a Christian revival is occurring in the UK at present. Most of the evidence suggests that church-going is recovering after Covid but, unlike some other social activities (like parkrun) it has not yet recovered to pre-Covid levels. The year-on-year increases in church attendance that some denominations are seeing are likely the result of post-Covid recovery and not the result of influxes of new converts.

In particular, the bombastic descriptions included in the Quiet Revival report - “revolutionary”, “transformational”, “the tide of faith has turned” etc. - do not match the totality of the data, and are a stretch even when used to describe their own data. Researchers, reporters and public advocacy organisations should be more careful when discussing evidence of this sort, and I am frustrated and disappointed by some of the cavalier and inaccurate reporting I have encountered as I pursued this line of research.

Young People Not Attending Church Massively More

In particular, I think the Quiet Revival findings regarding young people’s church attendance are likely fallacious. Every other indicator suggests that young people are not attending church in large numbers, and a massive jump in the percentage of young people attending church regularly would be more widely noticed and remarked upon in other, similar studies. I agree with the Church Mouse blog when they say that the Quiet Revival’s findings in this area are “simply not credible” when extrapolated to the whole population of the UK.

Still Signs of Diminishing Christian Influence in the UK

When looked at as a whole, the data suggests that Christianity is still in decline in the UK. The Church of England accepts, for instance, that while they are recovering after Covid, not only have they failed to reach pre-Covid levels of church attendance, but attendance is below where a trend-line would predict had Covid never happened (see p. 14). Furthermore, evidence from the Quiet Revival report itself suggests a continued decline in Christian affiliation, including among the young: their survey found only 39% of people identify as Christians, an even lower percentage than in the 2021 Census (which found 46.2% of people identified as Christian). If accurate, this would make the Quiet Revival’s data a historically low watermark for Christian identification in the UK. This figure was even lower among those aged 18-34, at 29% (p. 18).

A Significant Change in the Cultural Landscape

At the same time, something clearly has changed. There is enough evidence from converging sources, I believe, to suggest that younger people are indeed more open to religion and spirituality than some older generations, and that this includes Christianity. There is evidence that a small number of young people - particularly young men - are becoming extremely fervent supporters of some quite conservative forms of Christianity. And there is clearly a renewed cultural confidence among Christian commentators and organisations - partly evidenced by the rapturous response to publications like The Quiet Revival. This shift in the cultural landscape could itself partly explain increasing levels of claimed church attendance, as young people experiment with an increasingly salient signifier of political and cultural allegiance.

Exploring the contours of this cultural shift would take me beyond my purposes in this post, which was to extensively examine every piece of evidence I could find pointing to a potential Christian revival in the UK - but I will say that the shift in the cultural landscape is real and provocative, and is (I think) related to broader political and economic concerns. I believe it to be related intimately with right-wing and traditionalist politics, and to have some baleful political implications - it is therefore a challenge Humanists like myself cannot afford to ignore. I will dig into that in a later post, but for now - no Christian revival, but some spiritual shift is afoot. We have yet to see where these changing religions might take us - but I fear it will be nowhere good.

The “Meaning Crisis” Misdiagnosis

First, a recap. Remember that the myth of the “meaning crisis” is based on a central diagnostic maneuver: the idea that many of our contemporary challenges are caused by a breakdown of metanarratives which previously - but no longer - helped situate us in the world. Some thinkers talk about religious narratives breaking down, while others talk about broad psychological or philosophical frameworks, but the central idea is always the same: something has gone wrong with the stories we use to make sense of the world, and therefore something has gone wrong with the world. The causal variables, in this theory, are metanarratives.

This may seem strange to you, so I’m going to quote a few of these thinkers saying precisely this so it’s clear I’m not misrepresenting their ideas. Keep in mind that these thinkers all use the term “meaning crisis” a bit differently (some use the term “meta-crisis” instead, or use the term inconsistently), so what they’re saying isn’t exactly the same - but the diagnosis of society’s ills stemming from some sort of metanarrative problems is always present:

• John Vervaeke (the single figure most responsible for the idea of a “meaning crisis”) says that the meaning crisis is “deeper than social media problems, political problems, even economic problems” and leads to “an increase of people feeling very disconnected from themselves, from each other, from the world, and from a viable and foreseeable future”.

• Orthodox YouTuber Jonathan Pageau, in a discussion with Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick, describes the meaning crisis as “a general sense that the West has lost its way in the sense of giving people a place where…they belong [and] that they have purpose”. Christianity used to give people this sense, but it has since been increasingly deconstructed, and this “manifests itself in all kinds of ways, from the breakdown of the family, people feeling nihilistic…ideological capture like crazy environmentalism or extreme nationalisms or ethnic identities or the LGBT stuff - all that stuff is in some ways a symptom [of the meaning crisis]…They’re all symptoms of the same problem…The promise of the Enlightenment didn’t deliver.”

• Tomas Bjorkman (an entrepreneur and philosopher) expresses a similar view in a discussion with John Vervaeke (who clearly agrees with Bjorkman): “all these different crises is that we see today - the environmental crisis, political crisis or psychological crisis - cannot be addressed individually because the crisis is on such a fundamental level that it is really in our collective imaginary …I believe that we have now…reached the end of the capacity of this both worldview and collective imaginary”.

• Christian author and podcaster Justin Brierley, in the 23rd episode of his The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God podcast, uses slightly different terms, but clearly has the same basic thesis: “We’ve spoken of many crises so far: the meaning crisis, the meta-crisis, the mental health crisis - all accelerated by technology and modern life - but I believe they all stem from the underlying story we’ve all imbibed: this mechanistic, materialist story.”

• Bishop Robert Barron offers a fragment of this sort of view in a discussion about the mental health crisis, in which he restates Jung’s view that “all of our psychological problems are spiritual problems”. Our society, he argues, is “running counter to this absolutely elemental human longing”, and so the crisis of mental illness is “deeply related” to religious disaffiliation.

Common to all these views is the theory that some sort of “deeper” spiritual, meataphyiscal, or metanarratological (!) problem causes various concrete problems, like a mental health crisis, family breakdown, polarised politics, and (my favourite) “LGBT stuff”.

The Challenges We Face

Before I dig into why I think the meaning crisis theory is wrong, I want to acknowledge that contemporary society faces many profound challenges - indeed, one of the reasons the meaning crisis myth is so compelling is that the problems it claims to be able to solve are (for the most part) real. Briefly describing some of these challenges will help, I think, make clear why I think the crisis of meaning (such as it is) is caused by these problems, rather than the other way round.1

The Political Challenge

Both the US and the UK are currently undergoing a crisis of political legitimacy and trust. Trust in government is exceedingly low in both the US and in the UK - people don’t trust politics as a whole, political parties, or individual political leaders. Disaffection in politics has resulted in low turnouts - the 2024 UK general election saw the lowest turnout since universal suffrage, and while turnout in recent elections in the USA was relatively high it’s still much lower than in many other countries. Another outcome has been the rise of smaller parties (mostly in the UK, where it is easier for small parties to make a difference), and the success of more radical elements within the legacy parties (mostly in the USA, where the system squeezes very wide ranges of political opinion into two parties).

At worst, this collection of problems can lead to political extremism, as people frustrated with and distrusting of “politics as usual” look elsewhere for answers. The murders of MPs Jo Cox and Sir David Amess in the UK, along with other disturbing trends, led the last government to declare “The threat from extremism has been steadily growing for many years.” The USA has in recent years seen an increase in domestic violent extremism, of which the attack on the US Capitol of January 6th 2021, and the assassination attempt on Donald Trump (which occurred as I was writing this article) are high profile examples.

These are all signs that our politics is broken, unable to represent those it is supposed to serve while hastening the rise of those who wish to serve themselves at the public’s expense.

The Economic Challenge

Our economic system is, like our political system, struggling. The UK is in a particularly bad way, with a sluggish economy and high inflation precipitating a cost of living crisis. The price of essential goods has been increasing faster than wages, squeezing many, mostly lower income, people and forcing record numbers to use food banks. People struggle to find the money to heat their homes and to rent or buy a home. Local government is broke, and some are even bankrupt. The UK economy is, in short, doing very poorly.

The USA is doing better, but exemplifies another problem: truly staggering inequality. Whether measured by income or by wealth, inequality in the USA is getting worse, not better. Pew, for instance, considers a host of inequality indicators, and not one of them is improving: the gap between upper and middle/lower income families is increasing; the share of US income received by upper income families is increasing; income inequality is increasing. Perhaps most startlingly, they report that “the richest families are the only group to have gained wealth since the Great Recession" - part of a broader picture in which “the richest are getting richer faster​​”.

Stagnating quality of life and increasing inequality are a toxic combination. While people may be convinced that economic inequality is a reasonable tradeoff for economic growth, they will not buy into a society in which they are getting worse off while others, already much richer than them, are getting better off.

The Climate Challenge

There is now both an overwhelming scientific and growing popular consensus (yes, even in the USA) that human beings are altering the climate of this planet, causing a host of problems. The climate challenge is, in the long term, the biggest of them all. Let's start with the direct effects: both small-scale changes, as we raze our forests and pollute our oceans and large-scale changes, as we alter the ecosystem of the planet itself. This is not a distant threat – the effects of climate change are happening right now. The UK government flatly declares “The UK’s climate is changing already”, while NASA says “Effects that scientists had long predicted would result from global climate change are now occurring, such as sea ice loss, accelerated sea level rise, and longer, more intense heat waves.”

But these are just the direct effects of climate change. We must also consider the indirect effects climate change could have on our civilization and our way of life. As retired Vice Admiral Richard H. Truly wrote in a report on National Security and the Threat of Climate Change: 

"Climate change can act as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world… Climate change involves much more than temperature increases. It can bring with it many of the kinds of changes in natural systems that have introduced instability among nations throughout the centuries”

He lists some of the “instabilities” climate change could cause: 

• Some nations may have impaired access to food and water. 

• Violent weather, and perhaps land loss due to rising sea levels and increased storm surges, can damage infrastructure and uproot large numbers of people. 

• These changes, and others, may create large number of migrants. When people cross borders in search of resources, tensions can arise. 

• Many governments, even some that look stable today, may be unable to deal with these new stresses. When governments are ineffective, extremism can gain a foothold. 

• While the developed world will be far better equipped to deal with the effects of climate change, some of the poorest regions may be affected most. This gap can potentially provide an avenue for extremist ideologies and create the conditions for terrorism

In other words, it's not just the direct results of climate change which should concern us. We must also attend to the possibility that changes in climate will pile ever increasing weight on the very structure of our civilization, until the steel which undergirds our way of life bends, becomes misshapen, and finally – collapses. A cheery thought.

The Social Challenge

Finally, both the US and the UK are facing a number of social challenges (most of them, I believe, related to the challenges already discussed). Two often mentioned in relation to the meaning crisis discourse are the crisis of loneliness and the recent rise in mental ill health, especially among young people.

In the UK rates of loneliness have long been the topic of public discussion - so much so that in 2018 the then Prime Minister appointed a “minister for loneliness”. In the USA, loneliness has long been referred to as an “epidemic” - a description reaffirmed in a 2023 report from the Surgeon General’s office. Loneliness is a global problem: the World Health Organisation recently “declared loneliness to be a pressing global health threat” and established an International Commission on Social Connection to address the problem.

Alongside the crisis of loneliness is a crisis of mental health. A 2023 report for Pew called mental ill health “a new public health threat”, noting that “38% more people are in mental health care since the onset of the [Covid] pandemic than before.” Youth mental health is picked out as a particular problem - including a disturbing and recent increase in youth suicidality. Across the pond in the UK the state of mental healthcare has been called a “a national emergency” as millions await treatment in what feels like a never-ending backlog. Again, young people are particularly at risk: a 2024 report from The Health Foundation and the Resolution Foundation charted the shocking rise in mental health problems among young people. They wrote “Young people today have the undesirable attribute of having the poorest mental health of any age group; two decades ago, young people had the lowest”.

So, people in the UK and the USA are increasingly lonely and mentally unwell, which causes a number of institutional challenges as mental healthcare services are stretched and people feel disconnected from broader society.

My Diagnosis

Back to the “meaning crisis”. Remember that the thesis I’m critiquing suggests that the sorts of problems I describe above are themselves caused by a “deeper” problem - the breakdown of a metanarrative which previously shaped our lives and situated us within the cosmos. My diagnosis flips the direction of causality: instead of problems with our metanarratives causing concrete problems, concrete problems are causing a sense of meaninglessness, despair, and dislocation for many.

Why do I think this? I’m going to make my case in three parts: first, I’ll argue that the meaning crisis hypothesis is simplistic, replacing what are likely multiple and complex causes with a single, relatively simple one; second, I’ll explore the emptiness of the theories presented by promoters of the meaning crisis narrative; third, I’ll suggest that there are alternative theories, both more plausible and better evidenced, as to why people are suffering right now.

The “meaning crisis” hypothesis is too simplistic

Let’s start with a basic gut check: looking at the problems I’ve listed, how likely do you think it is that they are fundamentally the result of a single underlying cause? How likely is it, for instance, that economic problems like high inflation and social problems like an increase in loneliness have the same fundamental cause, such that if you trace their proximate causes back far enough you get to a single “deeper” problem? I don’t think that hypothesis likely. I think it is prima facie much likelier that these problems have their own individual causes, which sometimes overlap and reinforce each other but are not the reflection of a single bigger problem.

Many of the thinkers I’m discussing in this series share a tendency to relate everything to one undergirding problem - here the collapse of some previously-effective metanarrative. I think this is too simplistic: in general, complex social problems are caused by a variety of factors, and each problem has its own set of causes. Very rarely can disparate challenges be traced back to the same cause, and I see no reason to think we can do that here. Jonathan Pageau may think that “extreme nationalism”, “breakdown of the family”, and “LGBT stuff” have the same root cause, but I think this implausible: I suspect that each of the those phenomena have their own set of causes, and that it would be better to address them as distinguishable issues rather than to present a reductive causal picture. (It is amusing to me that so many of these thinkers decry “reductionism” in other areas of thought, but are very reductivist here.)

Lack of a plausible causal mechanism

This basic implausibility is compounded by the fuzziness in many of these thinkers’ accounts of how a breakdown in our metanarratives is supposed to result in other problems. It will help to revisit one of our thinkers here, to see how the causal pathway is unclear. I mentioned above that Jonathan Pageau claimed that the meaning crisis “manifests itself” in a number of problems. Here’s his argument at greater length:

“as Christianity deconstructed…we had this secular promise: we just give up these religious superstitions, and we have enough stuff, then we're going to be good to go - we'll all be rational beings that live in a rational world and we'll be happy…but it turns out that we actually need more than that. Human beings actually need more than just a bunch of stuff and being rational in order to exist. They need to feel connected, they need to feel like they they're part of something that's larger than them, that they're pointing towards a purpose that's higher than them - and that's the that's the problem of the meaning crisis.

But it manifests itself in all kinds of ways, from the breakdown of the family…people feeling nihilistic, people not having purpose in their personal lives. But then also our society's kind of just wandering and looking for for purposes to to to grab on to and so we're in danger of also ideological capture and which is why…over the top environmentalism, or or even extreme nationalisms or ethnic identities or also the LGBT stuff - all of that stuff is in some ways a symptom….They’re all symptoms of a the same problem:….the promise of the Enlightenment didn’t deliver.”2

What do we think of this analysis? I am happy to accept that human beings need to feel connected to something bigger than ourselves to flourish - this is a well-documented psychological fact. I can imagine that shifts in how we think about our place in the world could make affect our sense of purpose. I can even grant this might have an effect on people’s mental health.

But I cannot see how any of this relates to the breakdown of the family or “LGBT stuff”, and Pageau gives absolutely no reason to think these phenomena are connected. Why would the failure of the Enlightenment to deliver on its promises (if that did indeed occur) lead to changes in family structures or the increasing visibility of LGBTQIA+ people? Pageau doesn’t say. But if you want to claim that broad shifts in how we think about the world result in certain social changes, you must demonstrate how this occurs, either by providing evidence there is such a causal link, or at least by presenting a plausible causal pathway by which they might be related.

This is another common problem with the meaning crisis mythicists: they hardly ever (if at all) present a clear, step by step argument as to how the effects they describe come about from the causes they posit. They never answer basic questions like “If societies have been secularising for decades, why are these problems only manifesting now?” or “If a breakdown in metanarratives is the cause of all these problems, why do different countries - including countries more secular than the UK and USA - experience them so differently?” In short, their causal theory is weak, more of a vague gesture than a clear series of links from cause to effect.

Alternative, more plausible causal theories are available

The third (and most important) part of my argument is that, in contrast to the weak causal theory presented by the meaning crisis theory, there are plausible causal mechanisms relating the challenges we face to mundane problems. I’m not going to do an in-depth analysis of the causes of each of the challenges I mentioned above - that would make this article too long and is, I think, unnecessary to secure my point. Instead, I’ll look at one - the political challenge - closely, and give briefer outlines of what I think is causing some of our other challenges.

The challenge of people’s disaffection with politics is, I think, more the result of inflexible and unrepresentative political systems than any problem with our metanarratives. Both the USA and the UK are saddled with outdated political systems which can no longer capture and represent the full range of views among the populace. In the USA, a constitution that is unusually hard to change enforces a deeply unrepresentative political system which distorts the popular vote. The Senate is unrepresentative by design, while the Electoral College is an outdated mess which distorts political campaigning profoundly. Widespread gerrymandering (the practice of redrawing the boundaries of electoral areas to benefit one party) makes electeds unresponsive. And laws enacted by both Democrats and Republicans prevent the growth of political alternatives and force basically everyone into the two large parties.

In the UK, the “first past the post” electoral system (in which the winner of each electoral constituency is determined by a simple majority vote) leads to wildly unrepresentative outcomes, in which political parties rarely have a percentage of seats in parliament matching their share of the popular vote. In the most recent general election, the Labour Party secured just 34% of the popular vote, while winning a whopping 63% of the seats in parliament. By contrast, the Reform Party received 14% of the vote but only received less than 1% of the seats.

These structural problems have been compounded in recent years by the poor professional and personal behaviour of many leading politicians. The examples are too numerous to list: both the UK and the USA have been saddled with some spectacularly poor political leaders in recent years, of whom Donald Trump and Liz Truss are only the worst of a very bad bunch. It is startling that both the UK and the USA were recently led by individuals who since have been found guilty of offences, and high profile concerns about corruption dog both parliament and the Supreme Court. One article in The Guardian puts the UK problem very starkly: speaking of the last parliament, it described “financial misconduct, lobbying abuses, lockdown parties, sexual harassment, bullying allegations, absenteeism and misleading ministerial statements”. In the USA, the problem is exemplified by the conduct of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who has been repeatedly accused of outright corruption, but who cannot effectively be held to account under the current system. Through both incompetence and corruption successive administrations have demeaned their offices, besmirching the practice of politics in the eyes of the public.

I think the dramatic and obvious unfairness of our political systems leads to a sense that we are not fully in control of who represents us. Their inflexibility means that it is difficult to resolve the unfairness. Over time, people feel increasingly disconnected from politics, as if their voices don’t matter - because, for large parts of the electorate, they objectively do not. The corruption and bad behaviour of political leaders makes people think that all politics is corrupt.

People’s political disaffection - and their increasing interest in extremist alternatives - can thus be understood as a response to concrete problems with our political system. The disaffection and anger many people feel at our political situation is justified by how bad it truly is, with ancient unresponsive systems and self-interested politicians stymying reform and preventing the growth of new political potentials. I believe this is a much more plausible and direct cause of our political challenges than the collapse of any “metanarrative”.

The other challenges can likewise be understood as the result of concrete problems. The economic crisis in the UK is more plausibly the result of Brexit, the war in Ukraine, Covid, and bad political decisions like the disastrous Liz Truss budget than it is the result of “outgrowing our collective imaginary”. The climate crisis, too, has concrete, physical causes related to how we are treating the planet. Contrary to Jonathan Pageau’s assertion that “Millennials hate their lives” because “they’re being told…the world is falling apart because of ecological reasons”, I propose that Millennials (and Gen Z) might have higher levels of climate anxiety because of the actual problems with the environment, and because being young they will have to live with more of those problems for longer.

At first blush it might seem that the social challenges of loneliness and mental ill health might more plausibly be related to the “meaning crisis” - and I think it’s reasonable to pursue that line of inquiry. But these, too, have more proximate and realistic causes. Developments in technology - from the television to smartphones - have long been theorized to be one cause of a breakdown in civic life which might result in less participation in the community and therefore more loneliness, for example. As for mental ill health, this itself could be caused by the other concrete challenges: a world in which your political systems are not working for you, you’re getting poorer, and the environment is degrading is not one likely to result in mentally healthy individuals. As with the other challenges, mundane explanations are available.

The power of mundane explanations

In my view, explanations like this - concrete, mundane relationships between everyday problems and broader social challenges - are much more convincing and much more useful than the baggy, vague idea of a “meaning crisis”. More convincing because they rely on well-established, well-understood causal mechanisms and are based on easily observable evidence. More useful because understanding things this way enables us to tackle the concrete challenges and genuinely make the world better Because however difficult changing a voting system is, at least we know in principle how to do it - I have no idea how we would recreate a metanarrative.

That - how the “meaning crisis” myth disempowers and distracts us from our genuine challenges, and where we might look for solutions instead - is the subject of the next article.

This is The Myth of the Meaning Crisis.

In this series - I don’t know how long it’s going to be yet, or how long it will take me to complete it - I hope to achieve two main things. First, I want to respond to an increasingly prominent narrative in our public conversation: the idea that we are living through a “meaning crisis”, perhaps linked to a shift away from religious belief, which is at the root of many of our problems. We have a narrative gap at the heart of our culture, some say, and that is leading to a lot of other problems we are facing. I don’t think that story is true, and I want to use this series of articles to explain why.

But I don’t just want to critique other peoples’ stories: I want to tell a different story, offer my own positive account of where I think we are at, as a culture; how I think we got here; and what we can do about it. Broadly speaking, I’ll be defending a version of Humanism, a tradition of thought and practice which focuses on this world and on this life. Humanism tends to reject belief in gods and the supernatural, saying this life is all we get and that we have a responsibility to create a world in which everybody can live their one life fully. Articulating and defending that perspective is the second main purpose of this series.

In the process, we’ll explore the works of religious and philosophical thinkers - people who have grappled with the big questions of life. We’ll meet some of my particular philosophical inspirations, like the Pragmatist John Dewey, 20th century analytical philosopher Nelson Goodman, and contemporary Humanist Socialist Martin Hägglund. 

But mainly I’ll be responding to and riffing off the ideas of the people most engaged with the meaning crisis narrative. That means I’ll be critiquing the work of people like Jordan Peterson, John Vervaeke, Jonathan Pageau, Bishop Robert Barron, Justin Brierley, and Paul Vander Klay - so if you like their work but are open to critical perspectives, you are gonna love this journey. Along the way we’ll also encounter historian Tom Holland’s work, as we examine the roots of contemporary western morality.

There is a piece of this project with a harder edge, too. I believe that much of the discussion around the so-called Meaning Crisis has dangerous political implications. Even if some of the thinkers involved in this discourse aren’t political actors directly, their ideas bleed into politics - often, I believe, in ways which baleful effects for the rights of minorities and for our common civic life together. In this series I’ll make a case for why the Meaning Crisis story is politically dangerous, and to do that I have to engage with some less savory figures like James Lindsay, Elon Musk, Fr Calvin Robinson, and other anti-woke crusaders. 

My hope for this series, though, is that it will ultimately be positive, uplifting, hopeful. That I’ll be able to show you that even though the challenges we face right now are profound, they are not insuperable. We can change things, if we work together. We can - without religion - find our place in this world.

We begin with a story which is increasingly prominent in our cultural conversation: the myth of the meaning crisis.

What Is the Meaning Crisis? – Four Views

What is the “meaning crisis”?  Let’s begin back in 2021, when four thinkers - Jordan Peterson, Robert Barron, John Vervaeke, and Jonathan Pageau – gathered on YouTube to talk about meaning. 

At first glance, these thinkers might not seem to have much in common. Vervaeke and Peterson are academics associated with the psychology department at the University of Toronto, but Barron is a Roman Catholic bishop and Pageau is an icon carver. Barron, obviously, is Christian – as is Pageau, whose Orthodox Christiannity informs his work. But Vervaeke and Peterson are vague on their own religious beliefs, each inhabiting a space between the religious and the secular. Three of the four are Canadian, but Barron breaks even that pattern by hailing from Chicago. All four are straight, white men – a fact which might be relevant when we consider some of their shared political views – but this is not why they’re all in this video.

What brought them together is a shared interest in the “meaning crisis”, and over the course of a two-hour discussion they each give their own account of what they think it is, and why they think it’s a problem. Indeed, this video is titled “The Four Horsemen of Meaning” – a callback to the atheist Four Horsemen, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. These four, in the video, all argue that something is wrong with our culture today, such that we find it harder to live meaningful lives.

None of the four describe the crisis in quite the same way, but their presence in the same video suggests there are commonalities between their approaches. The fact that these four people in particular were selected for this discussion reflects that they are prominent voices in this new discourse – so if we want to understand the meaning crisis, it makes sense to start with that video, and with these four thinkers.

So, what do each of them understand the Meaning Crisis to be?

John Vervaeke’s Take

The “horseman” most closely associated with the term “meaning crisis” is John Vervaeke, whose epic 50-part video series “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis” helped popularize the term. Despite this, it can be hard to understand precisely what he thinks the meaning crisis is: his work weaves together countless philosophical and psychological ideas in a way which can be difficult to follow. A page on the website of his Vervaeke Foundation promisingly titled “What is the Meaning Crisis?” oddly fails to provide a succinct answer. The page talks about crises of mental health, the environment, and politics, and says these are “enmeshed within a deeper cultural historical crisis that John Vervaeke calls ‘The Meaning Crisis’” – but it does not then say what this “meaning crisis” actually consists of. The closest the page comes to describing the “meaning crisis” as a distinct phenomenon is to say “today, there is an increase of people feeling very disconnected from themselves, from each other, from the world, and from a viable and foreseeable future” – but it’s not clear whether this is another set of symptoms of the meaning crisis, or a way of describing the crisis itself.

In another attempt to explain the concept – the introductory video to his 50-part series – Vervaeke tells us that “the meaning crisis expresses itself…[in an] increasing sense of bullshit”. OK, I certainly feel an increasing prevalence of bullshit, particularly in our politics – but is this the “meaning crisis”? No, according to Vervaeke this is merely an expression of it, a symptom of an underlying cause. The meaning crisis itself is “deeper than social media problems, political problems, even economic problems: they are deeply historical, cultural, cognitive problems”. So apparently we have some deep historical, cultural, and cognitive problems which are giving rise to majorly problematic social ills, and this is called “the meaning crisis”. But what is it? What actually is the problem which is causing all these symptoms?

Hard to say. I’ve listened to all 50 hours of Vaerveke’s series on the topic, and I’ve consumed countless interviews he’s given on the radio, on YouTube, and in print, and I am still not entirely certain what he believes this “deeper problem” is. The closest I’ve seen to a succinct explanation of it is in the “Four Horsemen” conversation though – and particularly in one segment, excerpted by Jonathan Pageau on his channel. Here Vervaeke says that “We have a scientific worldview in which science and scientists and their meaning-making have no proper ontological place…Science and we are the black hole within this worldview that dominates us.” He goes on to say “This lack of ontological placement…is causing massive suffering.”

I take this to mean that the scientific worldview has no way of explaining science itself, let alone people and our experiences of meaning and truth. Meaning and truth, he says, “have no place within” the scientific worldview. And since this worldview is the dominant worldview under which we live, most of us feel ontologically out of place. Our “cultural cognitive grammar” (Vervaeke’s phrase) can explain everything except us – “We have no home in which we are properly situated”, Vervaeke says, “That’s what I mean by the meaning crisis.” This, Vervaeke argues, causes “enormous suffering” – including the high rate of suicide in Australia, the loneliness epidemic, the addiction epidemic, people choosing to live in the virtual world.

Vervaeke further explains the “meaning crisis” in a 2015 discussion with Peterson at the University of Toronto. There, he talks about how the Axial Revolution established a “two world model”. Under this model there is understood to be the normal, mundane world in which we live everyday, and also a world beyond it in which we find “fulfilment and protection from horror” (think heaven). Thus on this view our lives in this world come to be understood as preparations for life in the next world. Later, the scientific worldview “calls the heavenly world into question”, asking us to “imagine there’s no heaven”, and the advance of science means we’re left now with only the mundane world - which we have been “tutored for millennia” to believe is meaningless in itself. Hence, we suffer a crisis of meaning: the very thing our finite lives were preparing us for is now no longer believed to exist, so we have nothing left to live for.

So, Vervaeke presents complex picture, but the basic idea is that our relationship with the world and with our own lives has broken down because a metaphysical meta-narrative which used to shape and orient our lives has been called into question. The scientific worldview - distinct from the worldviews which preceded it - has no way of encompassing ourselves and our own meaning-making, and has dispelled the “higher world” of the two world model, so we are at a loss - hence, meaning crisis.

Bishop Barron’s Take

Vevaeke’s take on the “meaning crisis” is essentially secular - he doesn’t attribute the problem to increasing disaffiliation from religion specifically. Bishop Robert Barron, by contrast (and perhaps predictably, given he’s a Catholic priest) relates it to a loss of religious - and particularly Christian - belief and practice. Barron is relatively taciturn in the “Four Horsemen of Meaning” discussion, but in a follow-up video he expands on his understanding. There Barron links the meaning crisis to two problems: what he calls “scientism” and “the culture of self-invention”.

“Scientism”, for Barron, is “the reduction of all knowledge to the scientific form of knowledge.” Today, he argues, we associate authentic knowledge with science and, on the other side of the coin, consider the realm of values as subjective, merely a projection of our needs. He claims that “Today because of scientism there is a great occluding of [the realm of objective values]”. In other words, the presumed superiority of science crowds out non-scientific knowledge – including knowledge of the Good and the True. That’s what he means by “scientism”.

The second cause of the meaning crisis, in Barron’s eyes, is “the culture of self-invention”. This is Barron’s critique of postmodernism, essentially: he says that today “claims to objective value – whether that’s truth or goodness or aesthetic value” are considered to be merely “disguised plays of power” (a notion he attributes to Foucault).

Put together, these features of our contemporary way of seeing the world create a meaning crisis. He says this explicitly:

“The result [of scientism and the culture of self-invention]? A loss of meaning. Knowledge given by the physical sciences? Sure, we have a lot of that. Affirmation of our subjectivity? We have tons of that. But we’re losing a sense of objective value and a purposive orientation to that value.” 

His solution? A return to Christianity, and specifically Catholicism: “we need great Catholic scholars”, he says. “We need great Catholic artists…We need great Catholic saints!” 

So there’s Bishop Barron’s slightly different view of the meaning crisis: scientism and a culture of self-invention have led to a loss of a sense of objective value, and hence a loss of purpose in our lives. In response, we need to return to the secure and objective verities of Christianity.

Jonathan Pageau’s Take

Jonathan Pageau also links the meaning crisis to a loss of religious faith, but in a slight different way. In the four-way discussion he says:

“[In] The idea that we project meaning on an objective world, already you can see the alienation that is bound up in that very proposition. Which is: so where are we then? We’re not in the world? We’re these kind of ghosts that are floating above reality?”

This separation of ourselves from the world, Pageau argues, [Leads to] “increasing alienation…increasing fragmentation…[as] a direct consequence of that thinking.” 

In another video Pageau expands on his thinking. He is asked by a viewer “Why do Millennials hate their lives?” Pageau puts the blame in part at the feet of schools where, he says:

“All they’re being told is how the world is falling apart because of ecological reasons, because of racism…The very school system is giving them a sense that they’re…the last generation…They are being presented with an apocalyptic narrative on all sides.” 

So here the problem is that young people are being presented with the wrong ideas: the reason for the young people’s sense of meaninglessness and hopelessness is not the ecological crisis or institutional racism, but being told about those things. The narrative about those things is causing our loss of meaning - this point will come back later, so hold onto it.

The way out, Pageau suggests, is to rediscover Christianity. He talks of all the cultural myths which portray the rediscovery of lost knowledge or a lost civilisation - the secrets of Atlantis, the secrets of the Egyptians - and says these myths hold the key to unlocking the cage in which we are now trapped. Christianity, he says, is the ancient wisdom from the past we need to rediscover so, like the ancient line of kings in Lord of the Rings, we can renew our lost glory. 

Jordan Peterson’s Take

Finally, to Jordan Peterson’s take on the “Meaning Crisis”. Peterson is by far the most famous and influential of the “Four Horseman of Meaning”, so it’s important to understand his congtribution to the discourse. However, in the four-way discussion he plays primarily a moderator role, asking the other participants their views - so we have to go elsewhere for his understanding of the meaning crisis.

We find the answer in his 2013 TEDx talk. There, Peterson argues (like the other speakers) that science bears the responsibility. He says:

“Since the scientific age began we’ve lived in a universe where the bottom strata of reality is considered to be something that’s dead - like dirt…It’s matter, it’s objective, it’s external. There isn’t any element of it that lends any reality to phenomena like meaning or purpose. That’s all been relegated to the subjective and, in some ways, to the illusory.”

Peterson goes on to argue that because of our scientific assumptions, modern people are prone to pathologies like “nihilistic hopelessness which is a consequence of the recognition that in the final analysis nothing really has any meaning.” So similarities here with Barron’s view - science has presented us with an empty and mechanistic view of the world which has stripped out meaning and purpose. Further, Peterson suggests that not believing in transcendent meaning leaves you weak when suffering hits you, and makes us susceptible to pathological belief systems (he implies that Nazism and Soviet Communism are such belief systems).

The Five Common Features of the Myth of the Meaning Crisis

So there are four accounts of the so-called Meaning Crisis provided by four of the people most closely associated with the emerging discussion around that term. Their accounts are clearly different, but they share some key features.

What are these common features? I think there are five, but you can probably break them down in lots of different ways.

Point 1: The necessity of a metanarrative.

People need stories, most importantly a narrative to frame and shape our lives and give them meaning. These thinkers claim we cannot live without such overarching narratives - metanarratives - so if we discard one we will inevitably live by another. Everyone worships something, they say – we just choose what we worship. Because of this, these thinkers tend to believe that atheists, who do not believe in god, simply replace their belief in god with a similarly fervent belief in something else.

Point 2: Metanarrative collapse.

Most versions of the myth argue that for ages, in the west, we have had a metanarrative which has shaped our lives, given them purpose and meaning - but that metanarrative is now collapsing.

Some versions of the myth suggest our shared story has been the Judeo-Christian story - Bishop Barron and Jonathan Pageau basically take this view, as does Justin Brierley, a Christian writer and broadcaster. As Brierley puts it in his podcast The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God:  “The narrative of Christianity gave people a story to be part of.” This narrative shaped our values and our outlook – especially our moral values. Christianity is, according to Brierley and other (mainly Christian) purveyors of the Meaning Crisis story, the psychological and theological foundation on which our society is built. Now, because less and less people are religious, that narrative is falling away.

Other versions of the Meaning Crisis myth do not specifically identify Christianity or Judeo-Christian Values as a foundational element of western culture. Rather, they posit some other framework of ideas which served a similar orienting role – before it started to break down, that is. We’ve seen how in John Vervaeke’s version the “two-world model” of the Axial Age is the metanarrative which has broken down. Tomas Bjorkman (someone else who has talked about the meaning crisis) talks about “outgrowing our collective imaginary”, saying: “the collective imaginary that we are living under today, which we got essentially from the Enlightenment transition…[has now] reached the end of [its] capacity”.

Often commentators here posit a reason for this metanarrative collapse. Just as the metanarrative which has collapsed differs between tellings of the myth, so too the reasons for its collapse differ. Religious thinkers tend to point to widespread disaffiliation from traditional religion, and blame the New Atheism for challenging the Judeo-Christian framework. Justin Brierley, for instance, writes in The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: “The narrative of Christianity gave people a story to be part of. But as that story has faded in our communal consciousness, a shared existential question has come to replace it: what story are we now supposed to live by?”

Secular thinkers tend to point to broader causes, like a shift in our worldview away from a broadly Enlightenment way of thinking toward something different. Postmodernism often comes in for criticism here, as it is blamed for breaking down traditional categories and understandings, contributing to our supposed narrative instability. But whether religious or secular, often some reason is offered why our metanarrative has broken down.

The important thing about this stage of the argument is that some sort of metanarrative or set of metanarratives has broken down, leaving us unable to make sense of our lives, sapping them of meaning and purpose, making us unhappy and unfulfilled. This leads to loneliness, a sense of disconnection, a feeling of meaninglessness, a lack of hope. That’s the second core component of the Meaning Crisis myth.

Point 3: Emptiness of contemporary metanarratives

The myth then claims that contemporary metanarratives are weak, lacking in some way. It is often said that materialistic atheism, for example, provides no narrative to help us grapple with the perennial problems of being human. It clears away religious narratives but leaves a vacuum. Atheism, it is claimed, cannot sustain values, meaning, purpose. For some religious purveyors of this myth there is a sense that robbing the human species of belief in god specifically causes problems. Here’s Justin Brierley again: “Atheist materialism, with its promise of science and technology as a savior for the world, has failed to give us a story that we can make sense of life by.”

Sometimes it’s not atheism in particular that is criticized here, but other metanarratives like multiculturalism or political progressivism. Douglas Murray, a British political commentator and author, expressing his conviction about the emptiness of contemporary metanarratives, says: “We might be among the first people in human history to have absolutely no explanation for what we are doing here, and no story to tell about what we should do.”

So, contemporary metanarratives - such as they are - are unable to fill the vacuum left by the meta-narrative collapse.

 Point 4: The Rise of Pseudo-Narratives

Into the vacuum created by the metanarrative collapse and the weakness of contemporary metanarratives rush other ideologies, replacement metanarratives – because remember point 1, we cannot live without a metanarrative! But these metanarratives are themselves inadequate in some way, and won’t solve the meaning crisis.

Often, wokeism is described as such an ideology. Indeed, wokeism is sometimes described as a religion, a “new orthodoxy” which reduces individuals to their group characteristics, opposes free speech, is vengeful and dogmatic etc. Some describe Humanism this way too, arguing that Humanism is a “pseudo-religion”, based on Christianity, which seeks to take the moral fruits born of the Christian tradition while jettisoning the metaphysical roots which enabled them to grow (Tom Holland has made this argument).

Whatever pseudo-narratives a particular purveyor of the myth of the meaning crisis targets, they are agreed that, while they might have the form of religious stories which used to satisfy us, they aren’t up to the task of filling the void of meaning in our lives.

Point 5: A prescription to resolve the crisis

The final part of the myth is the prescription, the cure, the way we are going to claw ourselves out of our narrative quagmire and get back to solid ground again.

Sometimes this prescription is unambiguous: we need to get religious again, and specifically, become Christians. Clearly Christian thinkers like Jonathan Pageau, Bishop Barron and Justin Brierley think that Christianity is part of the solution here - remember Barron’s injunction that we need “great Catholic scholars…great Catholic artists…great Catholic saints!” That’s how he thinks we solve the meaning crisis.

A very clear example of someone offering a religious response to the meaning crisis comes from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, formerly a new atheist thinker, who recently wrote in an article for UnHerd: “…we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.” 

Here can be seen many elements of this myth in a super clear form: we have formidable challenges we cannot face without a uniting metanarrative. Contemporary metanarratives like atheism and liberalism are too weak. So we need a return to legacy, tradition, Judeo-Christianity.

Others offer a different prescription. John Vervaeke, rather than prescribing a return to traditional religion, suggests we should create new ecologies of spiritual practices which learn from our religious past, but don’t simply replicate it. Others provide a purely political prescription, usually involving the return to some supposedly lost conservative cultural values. The prescriptions differ, but there is always a prescription for how to solve the meaning crisis.

So those are the five main claims of those who put forward the idea of a meaning crisis:

1. We need metanarratives to help shape our experience.

2. We are experiencing a metanarrative collapse at present, because old stories which used to serve us have been abandoned or superseded. Sometimes a reason for this metanarrative collapse is presented here.

3. Contemporary metanarratives are said to be lacking in some way, unable to help us truly make sense of the world we are living in now.

4. Pseudo narratives rush into the void, but fail to give us the meaning we crave.

5. So we need either a new metanarrative or a return to an old metanarrative in order to fix the problem.

These five points together are what I call the Myth of the Meaning Crisis. Clearly, different thinkers understand the myth in different ways, diagnosing different problems and offering different solutions. But the narratives they offer have these common features, which is why it makes sense to group them and see them as part of a connected project. That’s why they all go on each others’ YouTube channels and promote each others’ work - they see themselves, at least in part, as engaged in a shared enterprise - and I think that enterprise is based on a misdiagnosis of the challenges we face, and therefore provides “solutions” which will not solve our problems, and in some cases are actually harmful. That’s why I’m writing this series in response.

What the Myth Gets Right

I want to pause here and say there are things the myth gets right. I don’t think that everything these thinkers are saying is wrong - they do identify some real problems and offer some insight. So, in the interest of intellectual charity, here is what I think these thinkers are right about:

• They are right to worry about the profound challenges the human species face at present. I agree that we are facing a collection of interconnected crises - economic, political, ecological - which combine to make our problems seemingly insuperable.

• They are right that we face crises of loneliness, disconnection, and lack of trust which are resulting in major mental health problems - particularly for young people. I see this in my work at my university, and I think they’re absolutely right to be worried about that.

• I agree we are seeing a resurgence of interest in some forms of spirituality and religion, and that the New Atheist wave has broken without having swept in a new age of reason and plenty (though I’m not sure that was ever really on offer). 

• I agree, too, that atheism alone is insufficient to make sense of our lives (although, again, I’m not sure anyone thought it was).

• I agree with them, too, that we should take religion seriously. We shouldn’t simplistically deride all religious ideas and practices, tossing them into the dustbin of history. Religious stories, practices, and institutions have a lot to teach us about living well.

In all these areas, I think the Meaning Crisis Myth-makers are onto something, and are sparking an essential conversation. Yet I still think there are some major problems with this whole line of thinking.

Why the “Meaning Crisis” is a Myth

So why, then, do I think the Meaning Crisis narrative is a myth? Because it makes three big mistakes. The first mistake is a misdiagnosis: the Meaning Crisis narrative misdiagnoses the problems that we face, attributing them to a breakdown in our metanarrative instead of to material conditions, which are the real cause of our problems. 

The second mistake is a misprescription: because the cause of our social ills is misdiagnosed, the wrong prescription about how to cure those ills is offered. Instead of pointing us to collective efforts to make political, social, and economic change, the Meaning Crisis story turns us inward in the pursuit of faith (or some other internal transformation).

The third mistake is broader, and runs through the whole enterprise: it is misevaltuation. Because its thesis is focused on how contemporary metanarratives are inadequate to meet our current needs, tseeing them as either derivative or deformed versions of what came before. Thus the meaning crisis myth systematically undervalues contemporary secular approaches to living, preventing us from seeing the value they truly offer.

Let’s look at each of these three mistakes in turn.

The mistake of misdiagnosis

First, misdiagnosis. As we’ve seen, the meaning crisis myth is based on the idea that there is something wrong with how we look at the world. These thinkers argue that some framework we use to relate to the world has broken down - this is its obsession with metanarratives. 

In this way of thinking, concrete, material problems - problems like economic inequality, political unresponsiveness, ecological anxiety etc. - are seen as downstream from metaphysical problems: our inadequate metaphysics somehow provokes material problems. And that’s why they focus their attention at metanarratives and how (in their view) to fix them - because problems at the metanarrative level are causing other social problems.

This might seem wrong to you - how can how we think about the world cause problems with our economy, for instance? But this is really what these thinkers believe. This is what John Vervaeke, for instance, means when he says the meaning crisis is “deeper than social media problems, political problems, even economic problems: they are deeply historical, cultural, cognitive problems” . See how Vervaeke’s mind, the cultural and cognitive problems are deeper, they are beneath or undergird political and economic problems. They are fundamental - so they need fixing first.

We see the same basic idea in Jordan Peterson. Remember what he said about nihilism when he was talking about how our scientific worldview has relegated human experience to the “subjective”? He said “nihilistic hopelessness…is a consequence of the recognition that in the final analysis nothing really has any meaning.” In other words, the hopelessness so many of us are experiencing now is due to - it is a consequence of - our contemporary scientific worldview. The worldview - the metanarrative - is causing the hopelessness. That’s what Peterson thinks.

We see the same in Pageau and Barron: both argue that something about how we situate ourselves in the world is causing other social problems. Pageau is really interesting here: remember when he was asked why some many young people feel hopeless and said “The very school system is giving [children] a sense that they’re…the last generation…They are being presented with an apocalyptic narrative on all sides”? See how he locates the cause of young people’s challenges not in any problems with the world itself, but in what they are being told about the world at school - the implication being, of course, that if they were told something different, they wouldn’t feel that way? Again, the metanarrative is the problem, not the world. And Barron thinks our supposed contemporary loss of meaning is the result of scientism and the culture of self-invention - once again the problem is with how we see the world and situation ourselves within it.

This is the central diagnostic maneuver of the meaning crisis narrative, and I think is wrong - it is a misdiagnosis - and hence the story is a myth. Instead of problems with our metanarratives causing concrete problems, I think it’s precisely the other way round: concrete problems are causing a sense of meaninglessness and despair for many. I’ll say more about what I think is happening in future entries in this series, but first we must review the other two mistakes this story makes. 

The mistake of misprescription

So, I’ve argued that the Meaning Crisis story misdiagnoses our problems. Because of this, it prescribes the wrong solutions - this is the problem of misprescription. When we go to the doctor to be treated for an illness, the effectiveness of the treatment depends on the accuracy of the diagnosis: if the doctor gets the diagnosis wrong they will likely give you the wrong prescription for treatment, and you won’t get better (and could even get worse). That’s what I think is happening here. Because the myth locates the problems with contemporary society in the metanarratives we use to make send of society, it promotes “solutions” based on repairing those meta-narratives.

Barron says we need more Catholicism; Pageau says we need to return to our ancient stories (especially Christianity); Justin Brierley says we need to rediscover the Christian story, and hopes for a turning of the tide of faith. What links these prescriptions is that they target our metanarratives - which makes sense, because that’s where thinkers believe we’ve gone wrong.

I think this is a misprescription, because I think the problems we face are much more mundane and material, and therefore the solution to these problems is equally mundane. Instead of changing the stories we use to make sense of the world, I think we need to change the world through community organizing, collective political action, technological innovation etc. Our sense of meaningless, purposelessness, homelessness etc. can be resolved through concrete changes in our material conditions and social organisation, and a focus on metanarratives is a distraction from that essential project.

I’ll expand in future articles, but this misprescription is why I think the Meaning Crisis myth is not just mistaken, but dangerous. Because it misunderstands the root of our problems, and therefore prescribes the wrong solutions to those problems, it points us away from the real solutions. It focuses our attention in the wrong place, and promotes ideas which will fail alleviate them or even make our problems worse. This is why I believe the Meaning Crisis myth is fundamentally “conservative”, in the sense that it promotes looking back and reclaiming the past, an impotent nostalgia that doesn’t challenge the real causes of our discontent.

The mistake of misevaluation

And, finally, misevaluation: the Meaning Crisis myth consistently and repeatedly under-appreciates the values of contemporary, and especially secular and progressive, approaches to making sense of the world. By saying the scientific worldview is inadequate to meet our needs; by saying that modern science has pushed humanity and subjectivity out of the frame; by constantly attacking postmodernism and other schools of thought which emerged relatively recently; by saying that nonreligious ways of navigating the world can’t explain fundamental features of our experience (making us feel rootless and homeless); even by lauding the architecture, art, and music of the past over that of the present (a consistent theme among many of these thinkers and some of their fellow travelers) - in all these ways the contemporary is diminished in favour of the antique.

I think this both fails to appreciate the value in contemporary secular metanarratives, and fetishises perspectives which actually themselves have a lot of problems. So a running theme of in this series will be an attempt to revalue the contemporary and the secular, to show that the ways we live and think right now aren’t hopelessly debased or missing anything essential, but rather can furnish us with a sense of belonging, the strength to make change, and hope for the future. A secular, humanistic worldview can five us a secure and meaningful place in this world.

Flipping the Narrative

So what is my response to all this, and what am I gong to present in this series of articles? I think the Meaning Crisis myth has things exactly backwards. I think our problems are fundamentally economic, political, technological - they are concrete problems, problems with our material conditions - and that those are causing the struggles with meaning and purpose many people are feeling. Things like the crisis of loneliness (and the mental health challenges that crisis provokes) are downstream of material concerns such as the state of the economy, education, housing, technological change etc.

My thesis, in short, is this:

If we feel we’re not at home in the world, it’s not because our metanarrative decenters human beings and our subjectivity, but because we cannot afford homes to live in. If we feel powerless, it is not because our metanarrative presents us as material beings at the mercy of material forces, but because the structure of our politics is systematically disempowering. If we feel unsafe, it is not because our metanarrative robs us of a sense of psychological safety, but because multiple wars are raging. If we despair about the future, it is not because our metanarrative doesn’t provide a vision of a better future, but because we are destroying the planet, putting our future at genuine risk. 

To the extent there is a “meaning crisis” at all it is the result of mundane political, economic, and ecological problems. Our difficulty making meaning is due to the contradictions in how we are living. To fix this we cannot simply change our ideas - we must change the world. Focusing on a so-called “meaning crisis” - or any other religious, psychological, or metaphysical explanation for our problems - makes it harder for us to focus on the real issues. The Meaning Crisis myth is a misleading distraction from the work we need to do to create a better world.

We do face crises: economic inequality, unresponsive political systems, rising political extremism, impending ecological disaster, the collapse of civic life. These provoke our feelings of emptiness, hopelessness, and despair. Repairing our metanarratives won’t fix any of them. Returning to religion will not avail us, because the problem is not religious. These crises are concrete, this-worldly, mundane - we face secular problems which require secular solutions.

But that means we can fix them.

Justin Brierley - former host of the Unbelievable? podcast, YouTuber, TikToker, and Christian author - has released a new podcast book, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity Again. The book argues that despite demographic trends in the west that show rapid disaffiliation of the population from traditional religion, there are signs that the tides of faith are turning, and that Christianity is on the cusp of a renaissance. The book is accompanied by a podcast of the same name, which makes broadly the same case - just accompanied by rather over-dramatic (though compelling) music.

Reading the book and listening to the podcast is a strange experience for a number of reasons. Much of the Brierley’s argument is based on conversations he’s had on his various podcasts and YouTube channels, and since I’ve followed Brierley’s career for many years I recall listening to the interviews he quotes from a sense of déjà vu ensues. Indeed, as I was a guest on Brierley’s podcast multiple times, I feel I’ve been part of the conversation being narrated, so reading it is unusually personal.

More than that, Brierley’s 15+ years hosting Unbelievable? roughly parallels the 15+ years I’ve spent working as an activist, speaker, and community leader in the atheist and Humanist movements. Brierley says in the first episode of his new podcast that he, having interviewed many of the key players, had “a ringside seat” for the rise and fall of the New Atheism. Well, if he had a ringside seat, then I was in the ring: I was part of the atheist movement all through the events Brierley describes.

Brierley talks about the first Reason Rally. I was there, dancing in the mosh pit toward the front of the massive crowd.

Brierley references multiple events which took place at atheist conferences. I was literally present at some of them. During my most active period of public speaking I addressed every major national atheist conference, countless regional ones, and some international ones too. I spoke at conferences for American Atheists, the American Humanist Association, Center for Inquiry, and Skepticon. I traveled the USA to speak for local and state atheist groups in Massachusetts, Missouri, Arkansas, California, Tennessee, Texas, Illinois, Milwaukee, Minnesota, and many points in between.

Brierley examines the influence of the Four Horsemen (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens). I spoke at events featuring all of them. Though I’ve rarely been a headliner at atheist events, the atheist speaking circuit - even at at height of the movement’s popularity - is very small, so at one time or another I met every one of the protagonists of Brierley’s story, sometimes at buffets and receptions for conference guests, sometimes in green rooms or at after parties. While they will not remember me, I have exchanged words with all of them. Some of the characters in Brierley’s story I consider friends, or at least friendly colleagues: we still get drinks together and catch up when our paths cross at a conference.

So Brierley’s account, at the start of his podcast series and of his book, of the “rise and fall of New Atheism” describes a formative period in my personal and professional life, features some people I know, and analyses events I attended and controversies I witnessed.

I was there. I saw New Atheism happen.

Perhaps that’s one reason why I feel the desire to offer a response: I swum the discursive currents Brierley charts, so I feel well-placed to say my piece. But also, if I’m honest, something about the argument presented rankles: there is just enough truth to it to be seductive, but too much missing to be convincing. Hence, this article (which might become a series) reflecting on the New Atheism and on Brierley’s interpretation of it. What did New Atheism get wrong? Did it get anything right? How good is Brierley’s analysis of what happened?

What eulogy does New Atheism deserve, now that it is dead?

What Surprising Rebirth Gets Right

There’s lots that Brierley gets right. He is right that New Atheism, from the start, was more of a popular movement than a scholarly effort in the philosophy of religion. New Atheism tended to present rather simplistic arguments in a forceful and sometimes compelling way - it did not engage with the most sophisticated forms of religious thought or practice. In this way it mirrored most Christian apologetics, the vast majority of which is targeted to a lay audience and completely ignores scholarly work on atheism.

He’s right, too, that there was always an unpleasant edge to the movement: some of the New Atheism was indeed animated by a genuinely anti-religious sentiment. This was not - let me be clear - a principled opposition to the problems religions frequently cause, nor even a sophisticated philosophical objection to religion as a social or psychological phenomenon. There is a perfectly reasonable form of “anti-religious” view which is based on sober reflection on the whole phenomenon. This is not what New Atheism tended to promote.

New Atheism, at its worst, instead offered a smug certitude, a way of asserting the superiority (intellectual and moral) of atheism and atheists to religion and the religious. I attended many conferences where speakers not only critiqued harmful religious practices, but mocked and ridiculed religious believers as well. There was a sense in some quarters that offering kindness and respect to religious people was to betray one’s own side, and there was an almost competitive nastiness in some online communities.

This in-group / out-group thinking led to a sort of dogmatism which particularly hampered clear thinking about religion itself. Some New Atheists came to reject literally any practice culturally associated with religion on the flimsiest grounds, just because religious people or communities tended to do it. Group singing? Religious and therefore bad. Ritual? Religious and therefore bad. Any sort of rules or structure? Religious and therefore bad. There was a reflexive repugnance, an anti-religious allergy, that made it nigh on impossible to talk thoughtfully about religion and its role in life.

Finally, New Atheism was too reactive and anti, and didn’t have much of a positive programme to offer. A lot of the presentations at atheist conferences I would attend would be about why some aspect of religion is bad, but beyond some sessions on science and skepticism there was frequently little said about how to live life without religion. This became a major problem when the movement began to examine questions more broad than simply the direct effects of religion on people’s lives, because there was no base of shared values from which to construct a response to those questions.

Yes, New Atheism had many flaws. I wrote and spoke about them at the time, trying to promote a more humanistic version of nonbelief. As a result I was frequently a target for some of the more angry atheist bloggers, who took me to task for being too conciliatory to religion and too polite to religious believers. I take comfort in the fact that many of those I blog-warred with have come round to my way of thinking, and I don’t hold a grudge. But I think it is impossible to look back at that cultural moment now and fail to see its simplistic dogmatism, it sense of superiority, and emptiness beyond a religious critique. All this is captured well in Brierley’s book and in the first episode of his podcast series.

What Surprising Rebirth Gets Wrong

Yet the portrait Brierley sketches still comes off as a caricature, to me: bad features are exaggerated or decontextualized, while good features are left out. Something in me, despite the problems I’ve just described, wants to defend some things about the New Atheism.

The main failing of Brierley’s analysis of the New Atheism is that it dramatically underestimates the political significance of religion (and particularly Christianity) in the USA, and therefore fails to fully appreciate the very important things it was trying to do. I think this is because religion is in large part a spent force in the UK: it has relatively little political influence. But this is not the case in America, where conservative Christianity in particular still has enormous power.

Having grown up in the UK before moving to the USA to study and work, I have had the opportunity to see first hand how different the two countries are when it comes to the power of religion. I can tell you for certain that the USA is massively more religious than the UK, to an extent most UK authors do not comprehend.

Even Christian commentators in the USA frequently miss or deny the influence of Christianity, in large part because they benefit from it. When your religion is at the top of the heap, you tend not to notice how that affects everybody else. That’s why Bethel McGrew (a Christian author) could say, in Brierley’ podcast, that the US was not much of a Christian country even when the New Atheists got started: the fish doesn’t see the water in which it swims, and America is drowning in Christian privilege.

It’s worth quoting McGrew at length because this section from the first podcast episode is so telling:

This narrative [the New Atheists] began to create…the atheists are telling you that these Christianists are coming to take away your rights as an atheist. They’re coming to take away your abortion rights, they want to police your sex life, they want to take over the schools, take over politics…They are dangerous zealots and they have to be stopped at all costs.

McGrew presents this analysis as if the fears the New Atheists were articulating were merely rhetorical devices to get people to work against religion. Later in the podcast she calls the narrative a “ridiculous” story meant to paint atheists as the oppressed underdogs fighting against Christian oppressors. But - how can I put this? - every element of this description was literally true when New Atheism was at its height and remains true to this day!

To wit:

Christians in the USA have for decades campaigned against abortion rights, and have recently succeeded in overturning them by offering their support to a President who appointed conservative Christian judges to the Supreme Court.

Christians in the USA are consistently less supportive of sexual freedom than nonreligious people, and are less supportive of LGBTQIA+ rights and equality (a 2023 report from the Public Religion Research Institute found “clear partisan and religious divides on [LGBTQ] issues”: a majority of white evangelical Protestants support overturning the Supreme Court ruling legalizing same sex marriage, and 40% think it should be legal to discriminate against LGBT people in the workplace).

Christian conservatives have for years been mobilising to take over school boards and, when they are successful, frequently attempt to influence school curricula and teaching in ways which reflect their religious views - including banning books they disapprove of. I was involved myself in a campaign to prevent a shadowy coalition of far-right Christians from taking over a school board in St. Louis, Missouri, so I have seen this first-hand.

Christian Nationalism and Christian Dominionism are on the rise. A well-funded and concerted campaign, Project Blitz, seeks to embed Christian Nationalism at the highest levels of the US government. Again, I saw this myself when a model bill from the Project Blitz Handbook was introduced in the Missouri state legislature, and we had to mobilise against it.

The influence of Christian Nationalism has only increased since then. Major political figures like Republican Senator for Missouri and stolen-election-conspiracist Josh Hawley and newly-elected Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson both espouse Christian Nationalist views. These people are dangerous zealots, and all responsible citizens should oppose the political project they promote. (It is telling that McGrew herself seems to be a fan of both: just this week she made supportive tweets about both Hawley and Johnson as well as, rather worryingly, British far-right YouTuber Carl Benjamin).

McGrew doesn’t see the Christian waters in which she is swimming in part because they buoy up her particular religion and partly, it seems, because she has some sympathy with the Christian Nationalists. Brierley doesn’t appreciate how deep those waters are partly because he lives in a much more secular country, with no analogue to the massive political power of American Christianity. Both present a distorted analysis of the New Atheism, because it was was in many ways a phenomenon which makes best sense in the context of America’s profoundly Christian religious politics and culture.

In Defense of New Atheism

Seen within its proper context - a very Christian United States with a highly politicized conservative Christian movement - New Atheism should be appreciated for having two genuinely laudable objectives. The first was to destigmatize atheism in a nation where to be openly atheist was then - and is still now - seen as an admission of immorality and untrustworthiness. The second was to promote the separation of church and state.

It is hard to convince people, sometimes, that there is a genuine and debilitating stigma against atheists in the United States: many Americans won’t admit to it while Brits refuse to believe it. But it is absolutely true: I traveled the country speaking to atheist groups and communities, I worked with numerous atheist nonprofits, and I heard hundreds of stories from people who were isolated, lonely, discriminated against, demeaned, kicked out of their homes, divorced etc. because they admitted to being an atheist.

I saw this prejudice personally many times. One example: when I led a workshop on atheism for a diversity conference a couple of years ago, I asked participants to say what words came immediately to mind when they thought of the word “atheist”. Some participants said simple definitional things like “nonreligious” or “nonbeliever”, but a surprising number offered responses with a negative valence: “bad”, “Satanic”, “evil”, “I don’t like that!” I kept the tone light in order to facilitate honest sharing and to encourage learning, but part of me was disgusted: these professionals, attending a conference on diversity in the workplace, were openly admitting to demeaning stereotypes about atheists they would never admit to about another religious group.

Atheists still have to deal with such negative stereotypes even today: a 2023 Pew study found that despite recent gains atheists are still one of the least favourably-viewed religious groups in America, with 24% of Americans admitting to a very or somewhat unfavourable view of us. making atheists about as unpopular with the American public as Muslims. This prejudice runs deep, and anyone who has a shred of commitment to freedom of religion - the idea that people should be free to explore religious ideas and beliefs for themselves, and choose their own path - would want to eradicate anti-atheist stigma.

New Atheism should be lauded for attempting to tackle this problem directly.

As we’ve seen, in the USA conservative Christians are constantly infringing on people’s rights, and is constantly attempting to change the law to force everyone to live by its own values. While I was serving my humanist congregation in St. Louis I constantly had to respond to attempts by Christian lobbyists, religious groups, and politicians to promote Christianity using public money: they wanted to teach the Bible (and only the Bible) in state-funded schools, put the Ten Commandments outside court buildings, put “In God We Trust” on police cars, use the sex education curriculum to promote Christian sexual teachings, and funnel public money to churches - the attempts to enshrine Christian privilege were endless.

This is representative of the fact that, for decades, conservative Christian organisations have been chipping away at the dividing line between church and state, ever more expecting non-Christians to live according to Christian beliefs. That campaign has culminated in the contemporary emergence of Christian Nationalism as a major force in US politics - a problem which will only become more visible during the upcoming presidential election.

New Atheism, by absolutely insisting on secular government, played a role in pushing back against these trends. It successfully made the relationship between religion and government - a rather esoteric and wonkish issue much of the time - a part of the political debate. We could use a forceful voice for secularism today, to push back the Christian Nationalists and Dominionists seeking to take over.

I appreciate that neither of these objectives of New Atheism make as much sense in the UK context. Certainly being an atheist does not carry anywhere near the same level of stigma in the UK (or in most of Europe) as it does in the USA, outside some very small and closed religious communities. And, while there are anti-secular elements to the UK constitution (such as the presence of Bishops in the House of Lords and the public funding of discriminatory state schools), in large part the UK is a secular nation in practice. So of course UK commentators might view the intensity of US-based New Atheism with a sort of bemusement and even disdain: it never made full sense in their context, and they could view it with the sort of wry, slightly superior detachment that (in my experience) the British tend to adopt toward anything we see as distinctively American.

But that the New Atheism doesn’t make sense in the UK context doesn’t mean it didn’t make sense at all. At the time, in the USA, it was doing something important. It was pushing back on genuine, entrenched Christian privilege that warped (and continues to warp) American politics and culture. And it was creating spaces for atheists - a distrusted and disliked minority subject to genuine religious marginalisation - to find community and assert their rights and dignity.

(They were also very important in many other countries where religion has a large political footprint - when I spoke at international atheist conferences it always surprised me that delegates from India and African nations were often the most enthusiastic New Atheists in part, I think, because they experienced very vividly what can happen when religion and government are intertwined. This deserves its own article, however!.)

New Atheism pursued its goals imperfectly - the problems with the movement were deep and more numerous than I have explored here. But there was, at the heart of it, the desire to do things that are both necessary and laudable - and New Atheism deserves credit for that, even if it failed, even if it has caused harm.

Where Now?

The question is, what comes next? After the New Atheism, where do nonreligious people go? Brierley’s book and podcast continue the story by exploring how New Atheism interacted with social justice culture - so that’s what I’ll examine next.